Drought and Floods in India
Floods and drought are normal occurrence in India. The monsoon over India is developed due to intense solar heating in late spring as the solar maximum move from the equator. Northern Indian ocean sea surface temperature are warmed, along with the plains of Northern India and the Tibetan plateau. The distinct difference between winter and summer wind and precipitation between winter and summer wind and precipitation pattern is what characterizes the monsoon over this region.
For many people in India it is the variability of rainfall on shorter time scales that has the biggest impacts intense heavy rainfall leads to flooding breaks in the monsoon of a week or more lead to water shortage and agricultural drought.
Indian Metrological Department (IMD)
IMD was established in 1875 with its headquarters at Kolkata. In 1905, the headquarter was shifted to Shimla, in 1928 to Pune and then in 1944 to Delhi. For convenience of administrative and technical control, there are 6 Regional Metrological Centres at Mumbai, Chennai, New Delhi, Calcutta, Nagpur and Guwahati. Its functions are-
- Provide current weather forecast and metrological information for optimum operation of weather sensitive activities like agriculture, irrigation, shipping aviation, off-shore oil exploration etc.
- Warm against severe weather phenomena which affects life and property.
- Archive meteorologist information for use in various activities.
- Detect and locate earthquakes and evaluate seismicity in different parts of country for development Projects.
The mission now concentrates on two global dynamic models: the climate forecast model, developed in the USA and the unified model, developed by the UK Met office and the thrust is to improve them further. IMD recently scaled down the severity of the cyclonic storm from ‘very serve’ to only ‘serve’ i.e. Hudhud. Hudhud originated from a low pressure are over Tenasserin and adjoining North Andaman Sea.
National Monsoon Mission
Precise prediction of monsoon is quite vital for economic activities, resource management and disaster management in India. So, the National Monsoon mission is implemented under Ministry of Earth Science in April, 2012 for a period of 5 years with an allocation of 400 Rs. Crore.
The mission’s focus is on developing a dynamic model for monsoon predication with precision over smaller spatial and temporal scale that would replace the currently used statistical forecasting system by IMD The aim and objective of the mission are-
- To set up a state of the art dynamic predication system for improved predication of monsoon rainfall on extended range to seasonal time scale (16 days to one season), and improved prediction of temperature, rainfall and extreme weather events on short medium range time scale (Upto 15 days).
- To build a working partnership between the academic and research organizations, both national and international and the operational agencies in the country to improve the skill of operational, monsoon forecasts over the country.
- Under the project, Pune-based Indian institute of tropical meteorology works on improving long-range and seasonal scale forecasts, while the national centre for medium range weather forecasting in Noida works to improve medium range scale forecast (upto 15 days) of rainfall.