Twenty-seven-year-old Sai Praneeth, a Bengaluru-based mechanical engineer, is busy browsing through various government and private websites, analysing the weather data to make predictions for Andhra Pradesh, his hometown. Praneeth is one among the many from the community of independent weather bloggers in the country engaged in giving quick weather updates to the masses.
Having helped farmers in Andhra Pradesh by providing them with timely weather updates, Praneeth was recently invited by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to talk about weather forecasting in a meetup held in New Delhi last month. He was also praised by Modi in ‘Mann ki Baat’ in 2021. “I am making use of artificial intelligence to track the weather to save on the analysis time and increase the efficiency of the process. Odisha is soon going to be hit by a cyclone. I am working on giving an overall update,” says Praneeth, who goes by the handle @APWeatherman96.
Like Praneeth, many weather bloggers as they have come to be known, are self-taught and have been pursuing ‘weather blogging’ as a hobby. However, their predictions have been helping many, including urban commuters plan their daily activities and know forecasts like sudden showers.
Weather blogger Ravi Keerthi points out that Karnataka doesn’t have a Doppler weather radar. “Karnataka receives the highest rainfall in India but there is no Doppler to track weather. We have to depend on the weather radar from Goa, Chennai, and Kochi to track the weather. Though we had raised the issue with the IMD authorities, no efforts have been made yet. Dopplers help in analysing the cloud movements and then tracking the rains. Hence, Dopplers are required in the Bengaluru or Mangaluru regions,” shares Keerthi who is currently in the midst of tracking the rains in Kodagu.
Having been into weather blogging for over 10 years, Keerthi (@ravikeerthi22 on Twitter) has been giving live updates for Kodagu, Mysuru, and Bengaluru regions. “Monsoon is something that everybody loves. I travel to different parts of Karnataka to track rainfall and the water levels of reservoirs during the rains,” says the electrical engineer by profession who pursues this as a hobby.
Adithya Ramesh, a software engineer based out of Bengaluru, has been an active part of the blogging community for three years. He says, “We basically do monsoon drives in the Western Ghats. I actively track the Bengaluru region. I have a rain gauge and we have a community of bloggers who have weather stations to track the rain events. People are trying to become more aware of the weather with regular rains, followed by flooding issues. I spend more time blogging when it rains and upload it on my Twitter page @adithya_ramesh7,” shares Ramesh, who was tracking the rains on Sunday night.
HOW IT WORKS
According to weather blogger Sai Praneeth, he gets data from different model agencies from across the globe. “The satellite images that run on a real-time basis and the radar images of the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) are also taken into account to get weather updates. When I started blogging on weather, it used to consume a lot of time because thorough analysis and groundwork had to be done only after which it could be uploaded. It takes four to five hours a day to give weather updates.”