Srinagar, Sep 4: The India Meteorological Department (IMD) has installed an X-Band Doppler weather radar to provide improved weather services to the people of Jammu and Kashmir.
A Met spokesman in a statement here said it will help in providing nowcast (very short range forecast up to 3 hours) for all types of severe weather events affecting the region, especially thunderstorm, lightning, squall and heavy rain. It will help in providing weather forecast for different sectors including tourism forecast for the pilgrims of Mata Vaishno Devi, Katra which has an average footfall of 8.5 million every year.
The X-band Doppler, installed at Jammu, will also provide input to numerical weather prediction models for generating better weather forecasts.
In conjunction with the data from other sensors such as satellites and automated weather stations, better forecasts and warnings can be achieved leading to minimal loss of property and life, thus providing better services towards public safety and socio-economic benefits.
It said that India meteorological department has a vast network of upper air observatories comprising of 56 Radiosonde, Radiowind and 62 Radiowind observatories. The Radiowind observatories are meant for collection of wind speed and wind direction data at different levels in the atmosphere for weather forecasting.
In the past IMD has been using the manual tracking methods to gather the wind information. As a step further and a part of Make in India initiative, the state-of-the-art Indigenous GPS based Pilot-sonde has been developed. The system is on a par in quality with the systems being manufactured and used in the other developed countries across the globe. This system helps to gather data in all weather conditions with minimum human intervention and has facilities of Auto detection of balloon launch and balloon burst.
The statement said Union Minister of State (Independent charge) in the Prime Minister’s office Dr Jitendra Singh will inaugurate the Doppler Weather Radar and Indigenous GPS based Pilot Sonde at Meteorological Office Jammu tomorrow. (UNI)
