National Seminar on ‘Nowcasting’ A Quick Location Weather Forecast

Tuesday, 31 January 2012 01:37

Written by Dinesh Singh Rawat

New Delhi (ABC Live) India Meteorological Department, Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES), Government of India is organizing a National Seminar on Nowcasting (Location Specific Weather Forecast for next 6-12 hours) during 30th to 31st Jan., 2012 at New Delhi. The main aim of organising this important event is to give a thrust for development and implementation of a 24x7 Monitoring and Nowcasting system in India especially with respect to high impact weather events. There were demonstration and discussion today on various tools/ techniques and other recent scientific advancements in this area.

Weather forecasts are issued for various spatial and temporal domains to meet demands of different users. Location specific forecasting of high impact weather events e.g. severe rainstorms, sudden dense fog, severe heat/cold spells, severe thunder storms etc for a very short time range still remains a challenge for the meteorological community worldwide. When any high impact weather event strikes any metro city or any other urban and rural pockets affecting lives of common people severely, we try to find out whether it could have been forecasted, atleast a few hours, if not days, in advance.

It is common knowledge that manifestations of internal dynamics within a given boundary condition are extremely complex and vitiate the outcomes on the small spatial and temporal scale of extreme weather. Operational forecast procedures mostly fail to forecast exact timing and location of any high end weather event. Further research on various tools used for issuing such forecasts e.g. empirical and NWP Models and their ensembles, also have high limitation in predicting high variability at 12-24-hours time scales.

Modern observing and analytical systems now in place for use in real time operations are expected to improve the accuracies of monitoring and forecasting of high impact weather events. A technology driven system of 24X7 Monitoring and Nowcasting is the need of hour. It should be able to predict the time of start, minute by minute progression and final cessation of the event. Such a Monitoring and Nowcast System will minimize the loss of invaluable lives and also property

A number of Forecast Demonstration Projects (FDP) conducted in different parts around the world have demonstrated that the only way to improve the forecasting accuracies of “high impact very short period (0-6hours) events” are by introducing a range of monitoring strategies viz. developing a MESONET over the area, including a dense network of DWR coverage and high resolution satellite pictures/products etc. In addition, very high resolution NWP and autonowcast systems would also be required as was done during Oklohoma Mesonet and Nowcast system, Beijing Olympic 2008 Forecast Demonstration Project and Delhi Nowcast for 2010 Commonwealth Games.