Government working on providing agro-met forcecast at local level

NEW DELHI: Efforts are on to explore the possibility to provide agro-meteorological forecast to farmers at the sub-district level, the government said today.

"We are fully equipped to forecast weather... and our services are world class. We are in the process of improving it further," Science and Technology and Earth Sciences Minister Harsh Vardhan said during Question Hour in the Lok Sabha.

Noting that improvement of weather forecasting services was a continuous process, he said "research efforts are initiated by ESSO-IMD to explore possibility of generating sub-district scale agrometeorological forecast with acceptable level of verification skill in a pilot mode."

At present, ESSO-IMD does not provide forecast and advisory services at the block level. The Gramin Krishi Mausam Seva (GKMS) of Earth System Science Organisation (ESSO)-India Meteorological Department ( IMD) has been providing crop specific advisories to the farmers at the district level twice a week.

Vardhan said "the operational implementation of improved forecast suite of models after the commissioning of the High Performance Computing (HPC) systems have enhanced the weather forecasting capacities."

This has been done by assimilating all available global satellite radiance data for the production of forecast products at 22 kilometre grid globally and 9 km/3 km grid over India, regional and mega city domains, he added.
Vardhan replied in the negative when asked whether IMD is unable to provide seamless services on account of shortage of staff and obsolete equipment.