IMD warning system needs urgent update
STORMS KILLED 120 PEOPLE AND LEFT A TRAIL OF DESTRUCTION ACROSS NORTH, SOUTH AND EAST INDIA ON MAY 2–3. WORSTAFFECTED WERE WEST UP AND EASTERN RAJASTHAN
ing system in India, interviews with IMD officials and independent experts reveal, with the focus being on improving forecasting abilities and not so much on dissemination.
IMD officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that their job is generating forecasts and dissemination was the responsibility of the local disaster management authorities.
However, the IMD’S own forecaster’s guide calls dissemination of bulletins and warnings the “most important part of weather forecasting services”.
“Our forecasts should reach the public and user agencies in time and without any distortion. For this purpose, forecasting offices may make use of all the available means including mobile phone, internet services, etc. as the situation demands,” the 2008 guide says.
INFO ON WEBSITE, GOES VIA STAKEHOLDERS
KJ Ramesh, director general of IMD, said they were working on content generation first. “The app will come later. It will take only 10–15 days to push through the app.” For now, the website is the only reliable source of information for the public, but requires some expertise and a few hours to navigate and decipher. “For the public, our warning system relies on stakeholders; they are the responders — disaster management authorities, district collectors, etc. So it has to flow through that chan- nel,” Ramesh said. Around 12.30pm on May 2, an email was sent out to senior officials, including the minister for earth sciences, and science and technology, Harsh Vardhan.
ACTIONABLE FORECASTS FOR PUBLIC
Ramesh said it was inefficient for IMD to push out warnings over several channels. “We send out emails and SMSES,” he said.
But the SMS service to public is still at an early stage whereas in 2012 itself, the China Meteorological Administration had tied up with two major telecom operators to send out SMS alerts.
The IMD is currently in discussions with BSNL to use their services to disseminate weather warnings. “It will be on an experimental basis,” M Rajeevan, secretary, ministry of earth sciences, said. “If it proves successful, we will approach private operators.” “The meteorological forecasts have to be converted into action forecasts. For example, if you know the wind speeds, you should be able to say that trees will be uprooted,” Kishore said. “Unfortunately this is not happening in India.”
“Multiple channels of dissemination should become centralised,” Ramesh said. “We are thinking of a cloud-based live platform that everyone can pull information from.”
The know-how to do this is available in many developed countries, including China, according to Ramesh. But generating centralised weather-related data that can be automatically converted to live infographics on a cloud platform and generates SMS alerts, will require heavy investment and a technological upgrade, and seems a far cry from India’s current system. “We will try and develop a cloud-based platform at the earliest,” Rajeevan said, adding, however, that there was no set time frame for this.