Had Hurricane Sandy hit India...

Every single calamity (like the hurricane Sandy) in the US comes as a wake-up call to countries like India where the value of human life is far below than it should be. It is obvious for us to judge our preparedness during such life-threatening crises. For the US government, the lives of its citizens are far more significant as also evidenced by their large scale effort that they have put into saving every single person in the street during the hurricane Sandy. Their meteorological predictions are no less than a gospel truth and are always near correct. While their technology has always excelled to make life better for its citizens, in a country like India this appears to be a farce on the tax payers' money when Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) fails to predict the monsoon properly. Their inability to predict accurately cost India heavily since it directly impacts the agriculture sector.

While technology is said to be in play at IMD, its predictions seem less convincing during a number of cyclones and tsunamis that swept thousands of lives in the Indian hinterland from time to time. While it is true that our meteorological preparedness seems always short, IMD has tried to implement different technologies to be accurate in terms of weather predictions.

Integrated weather forecasting system a joke

To fend off the general perception which says that IMD is one of the late adopters of good technologies, it is important to note that IMD is one of the first organizations that employed everything from telegrams to computerized switching networks, satellite transmission, etc. Earlier, IMD forecasters used to be surrounded in a flurry of charts detailing the exact windspeeds and rainfall data from the different stations. But it is now a thing of the past.

In 2007, IMD deployed a new statistical forecasting system known as ensemble forecasting which uses five predictors from April research and three more from May. But this technique that helped IMD make several predictions about rainfall, failed to predict the 2009 drought, though it was able to predict that rainfall would be dramatically low.

Thus, recently IMD has tried to modernize its methods to provide better forecast predictions for which it has entered into the alliance with French weather agency Meteo France to harness trillions of bytes of supercomputing power to assimilate and predict data from across the world so that it is able to generate hourly and daily forecasts.

The new system set up with Meteo France in September 2010 cost the country Rs 10 bn ($220 mn). The system also called an integrated forecasting and communication system allows the department to make accurate meteorological predictions. After the system is in place the department claims to have joined the countries where the best technologies are in place for weather prediction.

As per the Indian Meteorological Department, the system collects data from various observatories, sensors, doppler radars and automatic weather stations which is further analysed by the weather experts to forecast.

The system is said to provide weather predictions of location-specific areas in a customized manner. The weather experts sitting in Delhi, as claimed by the IMD, pick up data from any radar spread across the country and make weather forecasts for any part of the country.

The hi-tech system is touted as a value addition for the aviation sector, agro-met services, disaster management and other services provided by IMD. In one of the media statements L S Rathore, current director general, IMD, also believes it to be a great improvement in the way IMD has made data accessible to the general public. He even goes no claiming that even Pakistan also relies on the IMD website for their monitoring and forecasting purposes.

IMD which claims to have a network of around 6,000 rain gauges majorly depends on about 2,000. While a lot goes negative about the department for its failed predictions, it has not refrained from investing substantially in transmitting the measurements of rainfall, windspeed, surface temperature and cloud patterns from every corner of the country.

It is now working on Rs 400 crore programme called the monsoon mission aimed at developing a model that relies on actual weather conditions on any given day, rather than statistics, to simulate the output. The model is expected to be operational by 2017.

 

In one of the speeches, Shailesh Nayak, secretary, ministry of earth sciences also vouches for integrated weather forecast system and more weather radars, automatic weather stations as well as massive amounts of computing power.

Also, the Indian Tsunami Early Warning Centre (ITEWC) at Hyderabad is also being upgraded to a global tsunami warning system by networking it with other tsunami warning centres across the world. The 1800 coastal forecast points under ITEWC will be connected and upgraded to accurately forecast tsunami.

Moving ahead with disaster management

While in the US predictions are used to warn citizens on time and evacuate to safer places in time, it becomes often late by the time Indians are warned about a tsunami or cyclone. Thus, India also needs to show up its will to save lives of its citizens and have proper disaster management in place. It is however, a big task and can not completed overnight but has to be done.