US weather agency National Centers for Environmental Prediction wants to partner with IMD

CHANDIGARH:India's monsoon forecast has attracted the attention of the USA's national and global weather forecaster, National Centers for Environmental Prediction, which wants to partner with the India Meteorological Department (IMD) in medium and long range weather forecast to improve its systems.

North America's monsoon season usually begins on June 15, covering western parts of the country from Arizona, New Mexico, western Texas, southern Utah and Colorado to southern Nevada. The work done in India on monsoon forecast will help the US agency improve its accuracy, said Bill Lapenta, director of National Centers for Environmental Prediction. The better you simulate the monsoon models the better you would be able to get other signals in global forecast, Lapenta said, adding, "So we are always trying to improve the system.

We also have a monsoon in western parts of the US and the exchange will be mutual and beneficial." Most of the models that America wants to work on are dynamic models, which involve 3D mathematical simulation of the atmosphere on computer and integrating the state of atmosphere to future. Indian scientists work on both dynamic and statistical models, with greater dependency on the latter. The statistical model generates forecast based on historical data.

According to Lapenta, India is advancing rapidly in weather forecast, in terms of quality of system and information to end users, which, he said, is going to make the domestic met department extremely successful in future. He said a lot of brilliant scientists in India are working on observation, numerical prediction, forecasting tools and techniques.

Ziad Haddad, supervisor of the radar science group in the Radar Science & Engineering Section at NASA's Jet propulsion laboratory, California Institute of Technology said the US would like to partner with India just as the French did for the Megha-Tropiques satellite devoted to the atmospheric research. "We want to do projects jointly with India. We are planning alongwith the Indian Institute of Science-Bangalore, IIT Delhi and the US' scientific agency National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to do a project on global precipitation measurement mission, which should get underway by the end of this year," said Haddad.

Lapenta said global cooperation is required to surmount the challenges faced by weather forecasters. "India's challenge is matching requirement of observation systems to improve short-term and medium range forecast. Numerical models, data simulation models and high performance computing are required. Then you have to post process that information into probabilistic terms that are specific to your stakeholders from aviation to agriculture and energy," he said.


Currently, India has 725 automatic weather stations, 16 radars, 3,000 rain gauges and 521 manual manned observation posts to forecast weather. The US has 100-150 radars which detect precipitation intensity, wind direction and speed, and provide estimates of hail size and rainfall amounts. Along with satellites data, radars enable forecasters to provide accurate forecasts and advanced severe weather warnings.

On El Nino forecast, Lapenta said there is a lot to learn about the weather phenomena. "As for the quality of our coupled models to represent what happens in atmosphere, we are not quite there yet. So we need to work on those systems. There are limits to predictability. We need to know there is uncertainty in our weather products for long range," he said.