Storm warnings by Met went unheeded?
DEVASTATION 3 backtoback alerts issued but experts said forecasters failed to anticipate severity of the storms
NEWDELHI: Warnings of the chain of thunderstorms that claimed 125 lives were issued at least three days before the freak weather phenomenon wreaked havoc across six Indian states, officials from the India Meteorological Department (IMD) said on Friday. State agencies, however, said the alerts were not specific enough while experts rued that the forecasters did not foresee the severity of the deadly weather phenomenon.
What wasn’t flagged, however, was the intensity and the unusually widespread nature of the storms, the officials added. That, coupled with poor dissemination of information to those who were likely to be affected led to widespread damage and took a huge toll on human lives in Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan.
“We issued warnings on April 29, 30 and May 1,” KJ Ramesh, director general of the IMD, said. “These include colour-coded maps based on the severity and likely duration of the storms.” The dispatches and warnings are shared with the disaster management authorities and local officials as well, according to Ramesh. However, the information did not reach all the vulnerable people, he said.
“We are working on improving the public dissemination,” he added.
But experts and other weather officials said the severity and range of the storms was underestimated by the forecasters.
“Does IMD’s responsibility end with telling the administration? By putting it on the website and messaging officials? If you are issuing warnings why don’t you have a warning dissemination system in place?” asked Piyoosh Rautela, a Dehradun-based disaster management expert.
“If you communicate general
information about a region, how will a person know what is going to happen in their area? Unless you are specific about space, time and magnitude, the information is not useful,” Rautela added.
The UP government raised the issue of non-availability of accurate alerts from the meteorological department at a meeting of the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) in Delhi on Friday.
Relief commissioner Sanjay Kumar told NDMA officers that the state should have been given pin-pointed alerts regarding Wednesday’s storm so that an effective mitigation mechanism could have been put in place.
Thunderstorms are a regular feature of the pre-monsoon season in India, but their intensity and frequency is likely to increase with a changing climate,
studies show.
People living in mud houses with thatched roofs were the most badly affected as storms packing wind speeds of up to 130km per hour cut a swathe through six states -- UUP, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab and Haryana.
The storms were blamed by experts on a confluence of three weather factors - a cyclonic circulation, induced by a western atmospheric disturbance, high moisture levels brought by easterly winds and a recent spell of unusually high temperatures that soared to 45 degrees Celsius.
“We are trying to improve communication, not just to officials but also people in a structured manner, and also the modelling to improve predictions,” M Rajeevan, secretary, ministry of earth sciences, said.