National

550 automated weather stations to be set up

Chennai: The Indian Meteorological Department is in the process of setting up 550 automated weather stations across the country to collect real-time data to help in forecasting and dissemination of weather-related information.

“The stations will be set up in remote areas and equipped with sensors exposed to the atmosphere. All of them will be connected to a centralised server which will analyse the data for weather forecasts. All stations will become operational in a year and a half,” R. C. Bhatia, Director-General of Meteorology, IMD, told reporters on Friday.

State-of-the-art Doppler Weather Radars will also soon come up in strategic locations at Karaikal and Kochi, to be followed by Machilipatnam.

A computerised system for numerical weather predictions will be set up at the Regional Meteorological Centre in Chennai, he said after participating in the inauguration of a workshop on All Hazards Early Warning System, organised by the RMC. The cyclone warning dissemination system set up by the Centre would also be fine tuned, he said.

The IMD was also studying India-specific data to assess the impact of global warming and had found a significant increase in temperature levels in the last 10 years, as compared to the last one hundred years.

“The temperature increase curve has been climbing steadily since 1975 and the pattern is uniform throughout the country, though the North West is emerging as a hotspot,” Mr. Bhatia said. Monsoon predictions for the season were normal, though initially the weathermen had expected a deficient monsoon.

Earlier, Mr. Bhatia told participants of the workshop that an action programme should be chalked out with the help of user organisations, such as fishermen communities, to assess how effectively information on weather could be disseminated.

The Asia Pacific region was the site of 16 per cent of the world’s natural disasters and India was the worst-affected country, A. Ramalingam, Joint Commissioner, Commissionerate of Revenue Administration, said.

India was also one of the worst cyclone-affected regions in the world. Nearly 22 of the country’s States and Union Territories were disaster-prone and 57 per cent of the country was earthquake-prone.

A memorandum of understanding would soon be signed between the Revenue Administration department and the IMD for sharing of real-time data on rainfall through an internet-based reporting system.

The IMD was modernising its infrastructure and facilities to bring in forecasting standards comparable to international levels, A.K. Bhatnagar, Additional DGM, IMD, said.

R.V. Sharma, Deputy Director-General of Meteorology, RMC, was present.

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