High Impact Severe Weather Warning System

The Indian region is frequently affected by a variety of hydro-meteorological disasters such as heavy rains, tropical cyclones, storm surges, severe local storms like thunderstorms, hailstorms, cloudburst, tornadoes, floods, heat and cold waves, etc. almost every year. These disasters cause huge loss of lives and properties worth several thousand crores of rupees every year. While the natural disasters cannot be prevented or controlled, the loss of lives and damage to property can be substantially minimized by issuing accurate forecast/advisories of the impending impact of these disasters. Accurate and advanced advisories will greatly help the disaster managers getting sufficient lead time to initiate all necessary preparedness and mitigation actions which would help reducing risk due to these disasters.

The hydro-meteorological disasters such as severe local storms, heat and cold waves continue to take its toll on the human lives and economy of the country despite the fact that there has been considerable advancement in the prediction models which have demonstrated significant increase in the accuracy of short and medium range predictions in recent years. There is enough scope for further substantial improvement in skill of prediction of localized severe weather systems over India.  There is a need to develop suitable assimilation and modeling system for Indian conditions for improved prediction of localized high impact extreme weather systems. It may consist of utilization of observations of different types in data assimilation, model dynamics and physics, proper post processing ,bias removal, ensemble and super-ensemble approaches, etc. The products may be linked to required GIS system for better utilization in developing warning system for risk/vulnerability assessment, mitigation and management strategies by various central and state agencies.

a). Objectives:

1. To carry out field research through observations and modeling to improve the basic understanding of severe weather processes
2. Development and testing of cloud resolving model to improve forecast & warning of severe weather systems
3. Development of Observation Test Beds for severe weather systems

b). Participating Institutions:

1. National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecast, Noida
2. India Meteorological Department, New Delhi

c). Implementation Plan:

The programme may be taken up in an intense collaborative manner including operational, research and academic communities along with disaster management authorities for R&D as well as operational implementation in time bound manner. 

d). Deliverables:

Establishment of National facility for conducting field research on atmospheric processes.

e). Budget requirement

including foreign exchange component : 89.00 crores.

(Rs. In crores)