ani82v
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Guess what, you will never get reliable info from Forecasters. Smells communism to me.
Consistently inconsistent
When it comes to monsoon, why does the Indian Meteorological Department get it wrong so frequently?
Consistently inconsistent
When it comes to monsoon, why does the Indian Meteorological Department get it wrong so frequently?
In the last 130 years, IMD has never forecast a drought, neither in 1987, 2002, 2004 or 2009. Each time, it predicted normal or near-normal rainfall. In the last 12 years, not once has IMD got the forecast right. The closest it came was in 2005 when the prediction was 98 per cent and the actual rainfall was 98.8 per cent. The worst was in 2002, when the forecast was 101 per cent rainfall, while the country actually received 79.4 per cent. A senior IMD official, who does not wish to be named, says that in 1979 when India witnessed a drought, the meteorological department's forecast was that rainfall would be a poor 78 per cent. "But it was decided that this information will not be made public," he says. "I don't know why that was decided."
Jatin Singh, founder and CEO of Noida-based Skymet, India's oldest private weather forecasting firm started in 2003, minces no words: "It's a political problem. IMD's hands are tied. It can never forecast a weak monsoon. That will create panic in the market." Senior officials of several companies with stakes in the rural market also indicate that this is a factor. "Can you imagine the panic it will cause among farmers," asks the head of a company which has sizeable business in the rural market. Prices of farm commodities would shoot up, the stock markets would go into a tailspin — it would be politically disastrous. IMD Director General L S Rathore does not respond to the question on whether declaring a normal or near-normal monsoon year after year was a political compulsion.
....the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) in Pune is working on a Rs 400-crore National Monsoon Mission. The project's main aim is to forecast extreme events such as drought and floods, active and dry spells of monsoon and, more importantly, get information on how rainfall will be distributed all over the country. It has started using a dynamic model which has been developed by the US-based National Centers for Environmental Prediction. "The dynamic model involves using supercomputers and land and sea surface temperature data to predict the monsoon course," says an IITM functionary. "By using coupled (or hybrid) models (both statistical and dynamic), we can collect [even more] more information." Statistical models will still continue to be used but the idea is to graduate to dynamic models. Countries like US and UK have been using dynamic models for forecasting, and their met offices have been more accurate in their predictions than IMD.
The Monsoon Mission is being aided by a recently-acquired 2.5 petaflop supercomputer. IITM officers are not yet ready to talk about it. "Until now, IITM scientists have struggled to forecast extreme events — like floods or drought — in the medium- or long-term," says Ajit Tyagi, a former director-general of IMD.
