The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : Country’s rainfall prediction capability needs to be improved, says official

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Jul 25, 2007
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Karnataka

Karnataka - Bangalore

Country’s rainfall prediction capability needs to be improved, says official

Staff Reporter

— Photo: K. Gopinathan

Rain talk: G. Madhavan Nair, ISRO Chairman (left), Roddam Narasimha, Professor, JNCASR, and P.S. Goel, Secretary, Ministry of Earth Sciences, at the international conference on the monsoon, in Bangalore on Tuesday.

Bangalore: While India has the technological capacity to study weather through satellites and computational expertise, the ability to predict rainfall has a long way to go. The need for a comprehensive model that takes into account several parameters was expressed at an the international conference on “Celebrating the monsoon”, organised by the Indian Institute of Science, the Ministry of Earth Sciences and the Indo-U.S. Science and Technology Forum, which began here on Tuesday.

“Despite the growth in GDP, the economy of the country is still enormously dependent on the monsoon. As much as 70 per cent of agricultural land is rain-fed, and studies have shown that a bad monsoon can result in a 5 per cent drop in GDP,” said P.S. Goel, Secretary, Ministry of Earth Sciences.

‘Droughts not forecast’

“Our monsoon prediction capabilities need to be improved. For instance, the 2002 and 2004 droughts were not forecast. There is a need to work in a coordinated manner,” he said, adding that the Ministry had sanctioned Rs. 900 crore for an atmospheric observation system. The 11th Plan allocation for the observation system was Rs. 2,500 crore, he said. Madhavan Nair, Chairman, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), said satellites such as INSAT were not being fully utilised to understand the monsoon and to obtain data that could be turned into models for more precise forecasts.

Ocean behaviour

“But ground-based platforms are equally important because it is not just ocean behaviour and the atmosphere that determine the monsoon, but the phenomena that take place over land,” Dr. Nair said.

“There are 300 ground stations in the country, where rain, humidity, wind and soil moisture can be studied every hour and provide clues for modelling. We have plans to deploy such stations in 1,000 locations shortly,” Dr. Nair added.

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