US technology to help India chase monsoon

The US will provide India with advanced satellite data to predict and track the monsoons with a greater degree of certainty, thus reducing chances of economic dislocation and loss of lives as a result of floods and droughts, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Dec 26, 2009, 01:09:01 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The US will provide India with advanced satellite data to predict and track the monsoons with a greater degree of certainty, thus reducing chances of economic dislocation and loss of lives as a result of floods and droughts.

The US has agreed to provide India with imagery from its satellites on weather patterns over the Indian Ocean and the subcontinent that will allow scientists to predict rainfall 15 days in advance. At present, Indian scientists can predict the monsoons only one-and-a-half days in advance.It will also supply India a supercomputer that can analyse and interpret the satellite images.

The Planning Commission on Thursday agreed to provide funds to the Department of Earth Sciences to buy the super computer. The exact amount will be decided after the department makes a detailed presentation on financial requirements.

Climate change has made weather forecasts difficult for the Indian Meteorological Department. Unpredictable monsoons can cause losses of 1-1.5 per cent of Indian GDP. In absolute terms, this ranges between Rs 40,000 crore and Rs 75,000 crore.

“Once the systems are in place, we will have a capacity to predict monsoon region-wise quite correctly 15 days in advance,” said a senior Planning Commission official.

The fine print of the data sharing agreement was worked out recently at a meeting of a joint committee of scientists from the two countries.

A study by G.N. Goswami, director of Pune-based Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, had found between 1901 and 2004, the predictability of the monsoons has fallen from three days to one-and-a-half days.

“This is because of higher frequency of extreme weather conditions and increased potential instability of the atmosphere,” he said in a paper in Geophysical Research Letters in 2008.

Increased instability happens because of higher concentration of green house gases in the atmosphere.

“To overcome the increased difficulty in predicting monsoons, a significant increase in efforts to improve models, observations and enhancement of computing power is required,” the study said.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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