New Delhi, Dec 8 The India Meteorological Department (IMD) is continuously working on improving operational forecasting models for various weather and climate extreme events to help farmers and others, the Parliament was told on Wednesday.
"India has augmented its capability of High-Performance Computing (HPC) system, which is the backbone of the monsoon research and operational services in the country," Earth Sciences Minister Dr Jitendra Singh told the Lok Sabha in a written reply to a question.
"India has the fourth best computing facilities in the world for weather - it is close to 10 petaflops capacity now - and climate services and the Monsoon Mission has helped in the significant improvement of monsoon forecasts in all time scales, right from short-range to seasonal," he said.
The Ministry of Earth Sciences had launched an ambitious and well-resourced research programme on mission mode, called the Monsoon Mission. The first phase of the mission was implemented during 2012-2017 and the second phase (2017-22) is underway.
The Minister also said that India is now proud of having one of the best prediction systems for generating real time forecasts and warnings in all spatial scales from a location to block, district, meteorological subdivisions and homogeneous regions and temporal scales of a few hours (nowcast), 3 days (short range forecast), 4-7 days (medium range forecast), 1-4 weeks (extended range forecast), and one month to a season (long range forecast).
Dr Singh also said that the IMD is issuing Impact Based Forecast (IBF), which give details of what the weather will do rather than what the weather will be. "It contains the details of impacts expected from the severe weather elements and guidelines to general public about do's and don'ts while getting exposed to severe weather conditions like cyclone, heat wave, thunderstorm and heavy rainfall. IMD also runs an operational Agrometeorological Advisory Services (AAS) viz., Gramin Krishi Mausam Sewa (GKMS) scheme for the benefit of farming community in the country."
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