In farming, deciding when to apply pesticides and fertilisers is of vital importance. Disseminating customised location and crop-specific information that can be acted upon is a weather service of the IMD that has now become a global model. Farmers have made an estimated incremental profit of 25% due to the Agromet Advisory, the National Council of Applied Economic Research claims.
However, in the event of an impending disaster, the weather services needed to get residents of mountain regions out of harm’s way are weak. This was seen during the 2013 flash floods in Uttarakhand and the 2014 floods in Kashmir. In both cases, the local weather office forecast heavy rain, but there was no system to ensure that this information would reach all residents likely to be affected. This is in sharp contrast to recent successful evacuations of hundreds of thousands from coastal areas before a cyclone hits.
In this backdrop, 50 experts from India, neighbouring countries, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and other global institutions held a three-day meeting in Jaipur recently. They were trying to identify the challenges in meeting the weather service standard set under the United Nations-led Global Framework for Climate Services (GFCS).