New Delhi, Sep 12 (PTI) India will add around 70 new Doppler radars under Mission Mausam with the aim of predicting weather up to the panchayat level and improving short- to medium-range forecast accuracy by five to 10 per cent, officials said on Thursday.
At a press conference, M Ravichandran, secretary of the Union Ministry of Earth Sciences, said the five-year mission would be implemented in two phases.
The first phase, running until March 2026, will focus on expanding the observation network, including the addition of around 70 Doppler radars and 10 wind profilers.
The Union Cabinet approved the mission on Wednesday, allocating Rs 2,000 crore for the first phase, which also includes setting up of a “cloud chamber” at the Pune-based Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology to study physical processes within clouds.
“During the first phase, 60 to 70 new radars will be installed in 18 months. We already have 39 Doppler radars functioning. Ten wind profilers and 10 radio metres will also be set up,” Ravichandran said.
“We will also conduct an Observing System Simulation Experiment (OSSE) in the first phase, which will help determine the number of observations needed moving forward,” he said.
The second phase will focus on adding satellites and aircraft to further enhance observational capabilities.
Over the five-year period, the ministry and its institutions — the India Meteorological Department, the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology and the National Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting — will work to improve their understanding of weather and climate processes and prediction capabilities and develop weather management technologies.
Mission Mausam aims to improve short- to medium-range weather forecast accuracy by five to 10 per cent and enhance air quality prediction in all major metro cities by up to 10 per cent.
It will enable weather prediction up to the panchayat level with a lead time of 10 to 15 days and improve the nowcast frequency from three hours to one hour.
A nowcast provides a very short-term prediction, usually for the next few hours. It is useful for tracking fast-changing weather events such as thunderstorms, heavy rain or snow.
Tropical weather forecasting remains challenging due to the complexity of atmospheric processes and limitations in current observation and model resolution.
Observational data is relatively sparse, both spatially and temporally, and the horizontal resolution of Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models, currently at 12 kilometres, makes it difficult to accurately forecast small-scale weather events in India, according to a ministry note.
Climate change is making the atmosphere more chaotic, resulting in isolated heavy rainfall and localised droughts, which pose simultaneous challenges of flooding and drought. Cloudbursts, thunderstorms, lightning and squalls are among the least understood weather events in India.
Understanding these complex patterns requires in-depth knowledge of physical processes occurring within and outside clouds, on the surface, in the upper atmosphere, over oceans, and in polar regions, the ministry said.
This calls for high-frequency observations at the ground level and across the Earth system with improved spatial and vertical resolutions to monitor Earth’s dynamic systems effectively and increasing the horizontal resolution of NWP models from 12 kilometres to six kilometres to generate panchayat-level forecasts, it said. PTI GVS SZM
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