With casualties recorded due to lightning strikes occupying the second most meteorological disaster in India, the Odisha State Disaster Management Authority (OSDMA) in association with the Centre for Environment Climate, Department of Civil Engineering of Siksha O Anusandhan, has planned an international event to discuss on the socio-economic impact of lightning and thunderstorms on individuals and the nation.
The three-day “International Conference on Thunderstorm and Lightning in Tropics (ICTLT-2019),” to be held from January 17 to 19 next, will provide an excellent platform for networking of scientists, academicians, operational researchers, planners, extension personnel and different levels of stakeholders to share their views and expertise through close interactions, thus helping in contributing towards diminishing the adverse impacts of these extreme weather phenomena and helping in developing community adaptation strategies.
The collaborators for the conference include the Indian Meteorological Society (IMS)-Bhubaneswar Chapter, the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM)–Pune, the Earth Networks, USA and the RIMES, Bangkok.
An organising committee has been formed under the chairmanship of State Special Relief Commissioner Bishnupada Sethi for successful organisation of the mega international event. Eminent scientists, researchers, academicians, planners and administrators involved in the relevant field from Odisha and abroad are members of the committee.
The first-of-its-kind conference will have a deep impact on dissemination of awareness on thunderstorm and lightning. Further, it will have a great impact on guiding the relevant disaster management strategies of the State and the nation as well, hoped the organisers.
Notably, the past five decadal statistics revealed that the death toll due to lightning shares 39 per cent of all natural disasters.
In recent times, the thunderstorms over urban regions have also posed a great threat to the community in terms of urban flooding. Hence, forecasting of thunderstorms has become a challenging task for the weather scientists due to their rather small spatial and temporal scales and the inherent non-linearity of their dynamics and physics.