Mission Mausam
Context:
The Union Cabinet recently cleared Rs 2,000-crore – Mission Mausam. It aims to upgrade India’s weather forecasting infrastructure and fund research into weather modification.
Relevance:
GS-02 (Government policies and interventions)
Key Highlights:
- About Mission Mausam– It is a transformative initiative to boost India’s weather and climate related services and research. By incorporating AI based advanced observation systems, high-performance computing, and cutting-edge technologies and machine learning, it plans to augment capacity in weather surveillance, modelling, forecasting, and management.
- Aim: The aim is to explore “weather interventions” like cloud seeding and tweaking cloud structures to control rainfall and it also focuses on suppressing or increasing rainfall from dense clouds and reducing lightning potential.
- First phase: Until 2026, the Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES) plans to procure and install up to 60 weather radars, 15 wind profilers, and 15 radiosondes that will provide regular updates on wind speeds, atmospheric pressure, humidity, and temperature, leading to more accurate rain forecasts.
- Cloud Simulation Chamber: It was stated that a cloud-simulation chamber will be set up at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, which will help model rain clouds with high precision, which could assist in future weather modification efforts.
- Beneficiaries: Many sectors like disaster management, agriculture, defence, environment, aviation, power, tourism, shipping, transport, energy, healthcare, etc., are expected to benefit out of this.
Way forward:
- India currently has only 39 weather radars, significantly fewer compared to countries like the United States, which has 160 radars.
- The mission aims to address this gap to better capture India’s geographical and climatic variability.
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