KOCHI: India meteorological department’s (IMD) forecasting accuracy of heavy rainfall events is almost 78% for 24-hour warnings.
However, there is still a lot of scope to improve this accuracy, said M Mohapatra, director general, IMD, during an interaction on national weather services organized as part of Intromet-21.
Replying to TOI’s query on accuracy of extreme weather events, he said that IMD and ministry of earth sciences (MoES) is working to improve the modelling and observational systems to increase the accuracy of forecasting systems. “While there is more accuracy in cyclone prediction as it is a larger system and a lot of R&D has gone into developing it, there has been a lot of improvement in the accuracy of heavy rainfall warning from around 50% in 2014 to 77% in 2020,” he added.
The IMD chief said that the district rainfall forecasting needs to be improved because it is not the same in all places. “We have introduced district-level forecasting three years ago and are also now issuing impact-based forecasts. This accuracy varies from season to season and parameters too. Like we can accurately predict temperature rise but with heavy rainfall during monsoon season, especially mesoscale events, it is comparatively less.”
Speaking of the deaths caused by thunderstorms and lightning, he said that it is not because of lack of proper warnings, but because people seem to ignore them as they have to go outside for work, especially farmers. “We will have to work on outreach and awareness on the dangers of thunderstorms. We are almost accurate in those warnings. From 2019, IMD started issuing thunderstorm lightning warnings, the accuracy is about 88% in the before-three-hours alerts. Efforts are on to augment the weather monitoring network. From four Doppler radars in 2006, the country now has 30 Doppler radars. Another 26 radars will be set up in 2-3 years covering the entire country,” he said.
On demand from the fishermen community for regional warnings, he said the IMD is issuing warnings for deep-sea fishermen in local languages. Some states have developed mobile apps for the warning while at sea. IMD, Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS) and Isro are also jointly involved in issuing these warnings to states that pass it on to the civic authorities.
“INCOIS is planning to come up with a small-craft advisory for boats with outboard engines. We have been taking the concerns of the stakeholders seriously and proposing to come up with an impact-based warning system which will specifically tell which boats can go and which cannot. These are in a testing phase and will be boat-specific, differentiating between traditional fishing boats and deep-sea boats,” said Balakrishnan Nair, group director, INCOIS.
