The Uttarakhand Space Application Centre (USAC) has been directed to stop displaying the weather forecast for the State on its website after the State Meteorological Centre questioned whether this was part of the mandate of USAC.
While the Met office has questioned the validity of USAC issuing weather forecast, the Centre officials said that they were simply displaying information based on satellite images and remote sensing released by the Indian Space Research Organisation.
On July 20, the USAC had uploaded the weather forecast on its website on experimental basis with information sourced from the Meteorological and Oceanographic Satellite Data Archival Centre (MOSDAC) of the ISRO. The State Meteorological Centre director Anand Sharma said that forecasting the weather is not the job of the USAC. “The Centre is not responsible or answerable for its forecast, but the Met office is answerable because it has been assigned the task of forecasting the weather. Weather forecast is a technical task which requires subject experts,” he added.
Secretary, Science and Technology, RC Pathak informed The Pioneer that he had directed the Centre in writing to stop weather forecasting on its website. “The USAC does not have the experts needed for weather forecast; so it can study the information, but not forecast,” he said.
The USAC director Dr MM Kimothi said that the mandate of the Centre is evident from its name -- to facilitate the application of space technologies. “We were not forecasting the weather, but simply displaying information based on satellite images provided by ISRO. Out intention was not to compete with the Met office, but simply to provide relevant information on our portal. The information was already released by the ISRO and we were sharing it. he subject.