India Meteorological Department (IMD), Ministry of earth Sciences celebrated its 147th Foundation Day on 14th January 2022.
- On the foundation day, the Minister of state (Independent Charge) Ministry of Science & Technology & Earth Sciences, Jitendra Singh, launched India’s 1st Climate Hazard & Vulnerability Atlas based on the 13 most hazardous meteorological events, which cause extensive damages and economic, human and animal losses.
- 4 new Doppler weather radars (DWR) were inaugurated by Jitendra Singh, to further improve the weather forecast system.
Features of Climate Hazard & Vulnerability Atlas:
i.The Web-GIS (Geographic Information System) based atlas was developed by the scientists at Climate Research and Services (CRS) office of the IMD, Pune, Maharashtra. In all, 640 maps are available in the online atlas.
ii.The atlas provides a range of vulnerability for every Indian district with risks ranging from nil, low, moderate, high and very high categories.
iii.The Atlas provides information on 9 types of climate hazards viz. wind hazard, extreme rainfall, lightening, dust storm, hail storm, fog, drought, cyclone, and thunderstorm in terms of their spatial distribution of an average number of days of the occurrence or probable extreme values and normalized vulnerability index at the district scale.
About the 4 Radars:
i.The 4 DWRs include C-band Polarimetric Doppler at Veravali (Mumbai), X-band Polarimetric DWRs at Ayanagar (Delhi), Pallikarnai (Chennai) and Leh(Union Territory of Ladakh) (installed at the highest altitude in India).
ii.With the launch of 4 new DWR, the number of such radars in the country reached 33. The IMD’s has plans to increase the radar count to 90 for covering the entire country under the DWR network for better forecasting.
iii.The dual-polarization technology used in the radar will provide improved rainfall monitoring and hydrometeor classification by distinguishing between rain, snow, and hail. The radar will also help in monitoring, nowcasting and short-range forecasting.
Other Launches of IMD:
i.A dedicated website has been developed to facilitate better Aviation Meteorological Observations, forecasting products and warnings services.
ii.IMD has introduced Geospatial applications in following sectors such as Urban Weather Services, Nowcasting services, Numerical Weather Prediction Model Guidance, Agrometeorological Services, Aviation weather Services, Transport Services (Railways/Highways) to enable forecasters, users and stockholders to build products that are more interactive and more informative.
iii.Crowd source mobile App “Public Observation”:
- To improve the data reception and dissemination of weather forecasts, IMD has launched the Crowd source mobile App ‘Public Observation’.
- Using the app, the user could report weather observations along with their state, district, location and time of the events.
- This app is currently available in 4 languages i.e. English, Hindi, Marathi, and Tamil.
Click here to know more about the launches
Recent Related News:
World Meteorological Organization (WMO), has released a report titled, “The Atlas of Mortality and Economic Losses from Weather, Climate and Water Extremes (1970–2019)” which states that number of disasters, such as floods and heatwaves, driven by climate change have increased fivefold over the past 50 years.
