Impact based weather forecast is a technique that helps in monitoring the impact of rainfall and helps authorities to take real-time decisions. Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) has developed this technology to assess the rise of water levels in rivers. “IMD is trying to find new ways to improve impact-based weather forecasts. We also need to improve on flash floods and thunderstorms predictions” said Dr. M Rajeevan, Secretary, Ministry of Earth Sciences while speaking on the 145th IMD Foundation Day Celebration.
Further improvement in the technique will help to avoid a disastrous situation similar to Kerala floods. It can generate a scenario to help make decisions to release water or not from reservoirs after a heavy downpour and help every state authority to take the decision. This system can be run in a pre-event scenario.
He said that in cities like Mumbai where there is the unequal spell of rainfalls the department is trying to give accurate and timely forecasts. “We have installed four radars to monitor the rainfall spells so that better prediction can be made. And soon we are going to launch an app for this” said Dr. Rajeevan. A pilot project on block-level weather forecast has been launched for 1000 blocks and now 730 more blocks have been added to this.
Dr. Rajeevan has said that the department has improved a lot in the area of weather forecasting but there is a huge scope of improvement. Agreements have been made with Kendriya Vidhalayas so that students may be involved in automatic weather stations (AWS).
Three transmissometer- RVR (Drishti System) have been installed at Kochi, Thiruvananthapuram and Bhubaneswar and two hundred sixty-one more stations were added on Nowcast Warning Page of Newly launched IMD website for issue of three hourly nowcast warnings for severe weather and now in total 694 stations are there told Dr. Mrutyunjay Mohapatra, Director General of Meteorology, IMD.
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