IMD's IT Integration To Smoothen Up Weather Forecasting

The IMD (Indian Meteorological Department) is in the middle of a massive integration exercise to get rid of its compartmentalised way of working and to adopt a more holistic and centralised model. The department has procured hardware systems that will facilitate this integration process. These systems will enable the department to get the weather data at the right time, with the required consistency and accuracy.

The Met Department has ordered a ‘Synergy system’ from Toulose-based French company MFI (Meteo France International). The system will integrate the working environments of regional Met centres at Mumbai, Nagpur, Delhi, Chennai, Kolkatta and Guwhati which also includes other sub offices. Currently these centres work on their own models to process the data compiled from radar pictures, surface charts, synoptic charts and various other sources of data. This data is then sent in the form of bulletins to end users like the aviation sector, high sea travellers, ports, ONGC etc.

The aviation sector requires data every 30 minutes and some times even quicker than that; Mumbai gets weather updates four times a day (every six hours). “The biggest challenge for us is to get the data at the right time with the required consistency and accuracy, given the urgency of the data requirement,” said an official spokesperson familiar with the development. Currently, many routine data collection activities are done manually, thereby acting as a constraint for faster and accurate data processing. “The data collector has to physically call places to get the required data,” he said.

After implementing the Synergy System, this dependence will be taken care of as the Delhi Met Department (Headquarters) will decentralise the weather models to the respective cities customising them according to their requirements. The regional centres will be networked together so they would feed in the information online and it can be viewed across the board.

The weather models include information on various weather parameters like wind speed, humidity, moisture etc. Met employees process this information and issue forecasts. For example, if there are radar pictures from four different places, they can be analysed together and the forecast can be given using the Synergy system. However, earlier radar pictures from different geographies were processed separately.

The Synergy system will also be integrated with the Automatic Rain Gauges and the Automatic Weather Stations that act as sources of data collection.

The Met departments of other countries will also use this information. This will bring in data congruency and archival will be easy for future analysis. The weather expert sitting at the HQ will get a single window view of the weather information of all the cities that will result in a much better and accurate forecasting experience.

Some Met employees have currently gone to France for the last leg of training. After the Synergy system is in place, the High Performance Computing (HPC) system will also be integrated with it. The Department has procured the hardware for HPC. Moreover, as soon as the Doppler radar is commissioned, all of these systems will be running side by side.

The IMD has signed a MoU with MFI Synergy System. The department is hopeful that this integration process will be completed by January 2010.