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5
June 2017
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Weather(The Total Investment & Insurance Solutions)
As the
advent of the 2017 summer monsoon over mainland South Asia showed once again,
Indian meteorologists have become highly accurate in their forecasts. Gone are
those Jerome K. Jerome days when you left your umbrella at home if the
Meteorological Department predicted rain. Now the weather office can even
anticipate a relatively unpredictable phenomenon such as a dust storm in the
north Indian summer. It may not be as good for forecasts more than a week in
advance, but it's far better than before.
Farmers all
over India -- especially those who do not have irrigation facilities -- are now
using the agricultural meteorology (Agrimet) service of the India
Meteorological Department, and they can get crucial information such as
rainfall forecast over the next week through text messages on their phones.
There is a
lot that can and should be done to extend the scope of these weather
predictions to large-scale hydrological predictions, both short- and long-term,
so that farmers and administrators can plan for the more frequent and more
severe floods and droughts that are occurring in South Asia because of climate
change. The Total Investment &
Insurance Solutions
Information
about water flow in rivers is now available through a water resources
information system (WRIS) but that has severe limitations due to regulatory
issues -- there is no information available to the public about real-time water
flow in trans-boundary rivers, thanks to an outdated law. This means there is
no real-time water flow information available in the public domain from the
three largest river basins in the country -- those of the Indus, Ganga and
Brahmaputra. This clearly affects preparations to face floods.
When it
comes to drought preparedness, the situation is similar -- the information
available is better than before but not good enough. The Central Water
Commission now puts out in the public domain the water storage status of the 91
largest reservoirs in India and updates this information every week. This list
still leaves out far too many water bodies that are crucial in determining if a
region will have a drought.
The other
crucial information needed to know if there will be a drought is status of
groundwater, but the latest status available on the website of the Central
Ground Water Board is dated March 31, 2011. India is a country where over half
the irrigation is from groundwater. It is the world's largest groundwater user.
There is
another shortcoming -- India does not have enough monitoring stations to map
the air pollution over the country. Most of the monitoring stations are
scattered over a few large cities, though satellites show the most polluted
zones to be in and around industrial townships and highways. Improving this
observation system is crucial because air pollution -- especially through
aerosols -- affects local and regional weather patterns. The Total Investment & Insurance Solutions
Improving
these hydrologic and air quality information systems is essential to manage the
crucial food-water-energy nexus in a warming world. This will need integrated
observations and predictions, which can be carried out through a Regional Earth
System Prediction (RESP) framework. RESP treats land, ocean, atmosphere, ecosystem,
agriculture, and human interactions as components of one integrated system.
This has to be used with an integrated observation system (IOS) that provides
the data needed to build, validate and verify local and regional weather and
long-term climate system models.
Despite some
shortcomings, all the pieces are in place to build the RESP and IOS for India.
The country now has of one of the best instrumental climate data records of a
sufficiently long-time series covering a large-enough area. Empirical forecasts
of the monsoon and various hydrologic variables such as stream flows are now
advancing to dynamic forecasts. The research work going on at the Indian
Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune now includes extending short term
weather forecasts to long term climate predictions. The Total Investment & Insurance Solutions
For
information essential to manage the food-energy-water nexus, India needs two
steps. The first is to improve its hydrologic and air quality information
systems. The second is a national strategy to integrate the weather and climate
information with the hydrologic and air quality information and manage this
together. Then agricultural scientists can improve what they are doing right
now to help farmers plan their crops. The
Total Investment & Insurance Solutions
To make such
an integrated system useful, scientists also need to estimate the length of
time to which forecasts from such an integrated system will be reliable.
When all
these are added up, integrating and managing this information may seem a
daunting task, but it can be done. Building this capability is a necessary
requirement to safeguard the nation's future.The Total Investment & Insurance Solutions
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