CHENNAI: Tamil Nadu will become the first State in India to have its own network of doppler radars and develop an independent weather forecasting system to bridge gaps in the Indian Meteorological Department’s (IMD) forecasting, which were exposed during the recent northeast monsoon.
As of Friday, of four doppler weather radars in the Chennai region, only the one at Karaikal is working without any lag. The S-band doppler weather radar at the Chennai Port remains ‘defunct’ for want of important spare parts that need to be imported; and the radar at National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT) is not fully calibrated yet. The Sriharikota radar, which is an aging radar, was last updated on March 14.
Under similar circumstances last November, the Met department failed to foresee approaching rain bands. Chennai received a record rainfall of 21 cm in 24 hours between November 6 and 7. The Tamil Nadu State Disaster Management Authority (TNSDMA) didn’t get any alert on the possibility of such an extreme weather event, which led to widespread flooding in the city.
Weather blogger Pradeep John said even if all the existing radars are operational, there is a blind spot in north interior districts like Krishnagiri, Dharmapuri, Erode and Hosur belt, where there is no or very weak radar coverage.
KS Kandasamy, director of TNSDMA, told TNIE: “A very sophisticated Integrated Weather Forecasting System specific to Tamil Nadu will be developed using supercomputers, radars, automatic weather stations, and automatic rain gauges. The location for these radars has not yet been finalised. Our aim is to install 1,400 automatic weather stations. The Rs 10 crore announced in the budget is only a seed fund, and more will be drawn from other sources.”
In his budget speech, Finance Minister Palanivel Thiaga Rajan underscored the need to upgrade Disaster Early Warning Systems to accurately predict the weather. He also announced Rs 500 crore for flood mitigation measures.
Sources said two weeks before the budget, a meeting was convened by the chief minister’s secretary T Udhayachandran, and was attended by Regional Meteorological Centre (RMC) DDGM S Balachandran, Kandasamy, Revenue secretary Kumar Jayant, and some private weather bloggers. “Various modalities were discussed. The government only wants to complement what the IMD is doing and fill in some gaps,” a source said.
The RMC official said it’s a State government initiative and he has nothing to say. K Srikanth, a weather blogger, said having a wider radar network and generating high resolution images using mesoscale models that take into account local observations and conditions have become a necessity due to changing weather patterns.