Weather office dumps history for supercomputer
By siliconindia   |   Wednesday, 08 April 2009, 16:00 IST   |    5 Comments
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Weather office dumps history for supercomputer
New Delhi: In a bid to provide accurate rain forecasts, India Meteorological Department (IMD) is looking to adopt a new complex model that runs on a supercomputer, not based on traditional historical data. The move is expected to increase the accuracy of predicting the rains that is the key to success of India's weather office, reported mint. According to a top official of IMD, the new model one of the so-called global circulation models (GCMs), would increase the accuracy of weather office's forecast by 85 percent, while another expert says that such models are usually accurate only for short-term forecasts. Weather forecasting based on this model is already popular in many countries. IMD has signed a deal worth 88 crore with Meteo France International, France's weather agency, to implement the new model. As per the deal, "Meteo France will train IMD scientists and offer infrastructure facilities to facilitate this shift," said P. Chakrabarti, who's in charge of modernization at IMD. Chakrabarti added that the initiative is part of the Rs 900 crore modernization drive under way at IMD, but didn't disclose other details of the pact with the French agency. The weather department will start using the new model by 2010, and bury its traditional method of monsoon forecasting by using a treasury of historical data. Worldwide, climate scientists and atmospheric physicists use GCMs for medium and long-term forecasts. Most analyses of climate scenarios, on which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) bases its pronouncements of climate change, are based on such GCMs. IMD hopes the new model can bring down the error margin in predicting rain fall from current 5-10 percent to one percent. "GCMs require continuous, highly accurate data from as many locations as possible. To this end, we have already upgraded our balloon network (which is used to measure temperature, wind speed and other variables from different heights) and the results of that will reflect in this year's forecast itself," Chakrabati further added.

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