India to improve cyclone forecasting with new supercomputers and radar

NEW DELHI/MUMBAI, June 21 (Reuters) – India is investing in new supercomputers, high-resolution radar systems and automated weather observatories to improve cyclone forecasting efforts over the next five years, its top weather official has said.

The most dramatic revision in nearly a quarter century comes after early warnings and timely evacuations this month. helped the South Asian nation avoid heavy casualties after Cyclone Biparjoy struck its west coast near neighboring Pakistan.

“In the next five years, our cyclone forecast will improve further,” Mrutyunjay Mohapatra, director general of the India Meteorological Department (IMD), told Reuters in an interview.

Specific improvements cover the detection or identification of cyclone formation and the accuracy of critical elements such as landfall, wind speed, flooding and storm surge, it added, but stopped short of detailing financing plans.

The weather service aims to deploy 62 radars, instead of 37, and triple the speed of its supercomputers from 10 to 30 petaflops, to enable faster processing of weather-related data, Mohapatra said.

A unit of computing power, the petaflop refers to a thousand trillion operations per second.

Better computing power would allow the state department to use 3-mile (5 km) “high-resolution” models, compared to the current 7-mile (12 km), leading to more accurate localized forecasts, Mohapatra said.

The government also aims to more than double the number of automated weather observatories by installing 1,000 new units in the next five years, it added.

In addition, the number of automated rain gauges will be increased.

“Thanks to our early warning systems, casualties have been reduced to just a few people out of thousands in the 1990s, and further updates will only make forecasts even more precise and accurate,” Mohapatra added.

New Delhi revised its cyclone forecasting device after a ferocious tropical storm hit the east coast in 1999, killing 10,000 people.

Dotted with oil refineries, power terminals and steel plants, among other industries, India’s coastlines must contend with a series of tropical storms each year.

“Our early cyclone warning forecasts have saved millions of lives, and now we aim to further refine the entire process,” Mohapatra said.

Reporting by Mayank Bhardwaj and Sudipto Ganguly; Edited by Clarence Fernandez

Our standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.