The entire country will be covered by high-tech Doppler Weather Radar Network by 2025 to predict extreme events more accurately, Union Minister Jitendra Singh said on Sunday. He was addressing the 148th foundation day of the India Meteorological Department (IMD) here. The minister said disaster-related mortality has dropped to single digits with improvement in the forecast. He added that the Met Department's severe weather prediction accuracy improved by around 40 percent in the last eight to nine years.“The number of doppler radars in the county has increased from 15 in 2013 to 37 in 2023.
India will add 25 more radars in the next 2-3 years, taking the number to 62,” he said, adding that by 2025 the entire country will be covered by doppler radars by 2025.. Doppler radar is a specialized tracking system that uses the Doppler effect to track weather conditions and calculate information about the location and velocity of a storm or other forms of extreme weather events. Forecasting with the help of doppler radar is more timely and accurate which can be critical during safe evacuations in the likelihood of extreme weather events.
The IMD on Sunday commissioned four doppler weather radars in Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and Jammu and Kashmir which will bolster its weather monitoring capabilities in the western Himalayan region. These four DWRs have been installed at Banihal Top in Jammu and Kashmir, Jot and Murari Devi in Himachal Pradesh, and Surkanada Devi in Uttarakhand. Singh also dedicated 200 agro-automatic weather stations for agriculture advisory to the nation. IMD DG Mrutyunjay Mohapatra said the department's severe weather forecast (heavy rainfall, thunderstorm, fog, heat wave, cold wave has improved by 40 to 50 per cent in the last five years. He said the existing doppler radars will be upgraded to remove uncertainty in rainfall estimates. Ten doppler lidars will be commissioned in the Himalayan region.
The environment monitoring network will be further augmented by increasing the number of sky radiometres from 20 to 30 by 2025, he said. By 2025, the number of stations in the black carbon monitoring network will be increased from 25 to 45.
The number of stations in the surface ozone monitoring network will go up from 7 to 25 and that in the precipitation chemistry network from 11 to 21, the DG said. The IMD also aims to establish 660 District Agro Meteorological Units (DAMUs) by 2025 and increase the coverage from 3,100 blocks in 2023 to 7,000 blocks in 2025, he said According to the Annual Statement on Climate of India 2022 issued by the IMD, the country reported the highest number of human casualties due to extreme weather events in three years. The year 2022 saw 2,227 extreme weather-related deaths in India. As per the earlier reports from the weather department, the number of casualties was 1,750 in 2021 and 1,338 in 2020.