The Hindu Business Line : IMD plans 2 doppler weather radars for Kerala

Installation of Doppler Weather Radars (DWRs) at two centres and ramping up airport forecast infrastructure are two major initiatives that India Meteorological Department (IMD) has lined up for Kerala.

Delivering his inaugural address at an annual users' conference here on Wednesday, the Director-General of IMD, Dr Ajit Tyagi, said that the DWR would go live in Kochi in a year's time and another in Thiruvananthapuram in two years.

AIRPORT FACILITIES

All three airports in the State are slated to undergo modernisation as part of which the existing weather forecasting system and capabilities would also be fine-tuned.

While these initiatives are expected to bring about a qualitative improvement in studying weather and making forecasts, Dr Tyagi felt that there is scope for further improvement by tapping the synergy between the local IMD centres and number of excellent institutions with expertise in the field.

He cited the examples of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, the Kerala Agricultural University and the Cochin University of Science and Technology.

Giving the larger picture, he said that there have been significant developments in various disciplines of meteorology, including in observational techniques, monitoring tools and prediction methods of weather events in the country. These are being assimilated into the IMD in a phased manner. Efforts are also being made to improve ways and means of dissemination of forecast products.

POWERFUL COMPUTER

A large number of automatic weather stations (AWSs) and automatic rain gauges (ARGs) are being installed so that there will be at least one AWS and two ARGs per district. The conventional instruments for upper air observations at Thiruvananthapuram and Minicoy have been upgraded to GPS capability.

In order to improve scientific and forecasting capabilities, a high power computing system has been installed at the IMD headquarters in Delhi. The system boasts a speed of 14.4 terra flops and has 300 terra bytes of storage with a robotic retrieval system with separate servers at 11 other meteorological centres.

A number of high resolution global and regional numerical weather prediction models can be run on this platform on a 24X7 basis which will help improve weather and climate services of all temporal scales for the country, Dr Tyagi said.

IMD has installed Transmet, a high-speed system for international exchange of weather data; Synergie, a modern aid to weather forecasting; and Meteofactory, a new concept of better product generation and automatic dissemination.

At least, 350 AWSs, 200 ARGs and 10 GPS-based radio sonde systems have been installed countrywide. To meet the weather forecasting needs of the Commonweath Games, IMD has started installing special forecasting tools in and around Delhi.

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