India Meteorological Department to adopt dynamic models for more accuracy in monsoon forecast

NEW DELHI: After failing yet again to forecast the monsoon progression this year, the government has now decided move on to dynamic models which are widely used in US and Europe.

The weather office currently uses the statistical model to make seasonal climate forecast where the forecast is generated using various information received from agencies in the US, Europe and Australia. This has often proved to be an unreliable method for predicting the rainfall pattern.

"We will switch over to using dynamic models for weather forecast as they have higher accuracy level. But we still continue using the old statistical models as we don't have enough skills for using the dynamic models. More over unless we prove that dynamic model is better than statistical model we will not discard the existing model," said Shailesh Nayak, secretary, ministry of earth science which governs India Meteorological Department.

The government has been using dynamic model to predict weather for last couple of years. But due to lack of expertise, it has not been able to adopt it completely. "We have invested Rs 100 crore in installing dynamic models at our Pune office where we have trained 25 scientists to interpret and decipher the meteorological readings of these models. We urgently need to scale up our operation and train another 400 scientists for adopting this latest weather forecasting model," he said.

A dynamic weather prediction model involves 3D mathematical simulation of the atmosphere on computer. Dynamic models are especially useful for predicting rainfall over smaller spatial and temporal scale, which is not possible in the statistical forecasting system which IMD uses. "We have tie ups with US and UK based weather agencies for training our scientists.

In next couple of years, we will have experts who can work upon this system more efficiently," he said. While predicting the monsoons is a tricky job, the IMD has got it consistently wrong. The drought of 2009 still haunts the farming community. In 2009, the IMD had forecast that monsoons for the year would be normal. But as the months progressed, it became clear that monsoon would be less than normal and India witnessed the worst drought in 30 years.

The failure of the IMD to predict the monsoons correctly in 2009 was not a one-off incident. "Consider this: since 1988, in the last 23 years, the IMD has been able to successfully predict the monsoon only nine times -- a success rate of just 40%," said Mohini Mohan Mishra, national secretary of Bharatiya Kisan Sangh.