Weather gods: On ‘Mission Mausam’
Attempts at controlling the weather are still in the realm of uncertainty
Earlier this week the Union Cabinet cleared the ₹2,000 crore Mission Mausam, which primarily involves a major upgrade of instruments used by organisations such as the India Meteorological Department, the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting and the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM). These are the organisations that form the backbone of India’s weather and climate forecasting system on multiple time-scales. In the first tranche of the mission until 2026, the Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES), the nodal body executing the exercise, hopes to procure and install up to 60 weather radars, 15 wind profilers and 15 radiosondes. These are instruments that give regular updates on the changing parameters of wind speeds, atmospheric pressure, humidity, and temperature at various elevations of the atmosphere. Had this been all that the Mission was about, it would not have been too different from the National Monsoon Mission, launched in 2012. The crux of that exercise was to evolve a new approach to forecasting the monsoon by developing weather models that relied on intensive computing. Thanks to this, India has an umbrella weather model that can be tweaked to generate forecasts on multiple timescales — from daily to seasonal monsoon predictions. Beyond the monsoon, such a model could be customised for heatwaves, cold waves and local forecasts.
Making weather forecasts more accurate and improving precision is a never-ending iteration but Mission Mausam seeks to open more vistas. Instead of being a slave to weather, humankind tries to control it. One of the proposals associated with the new mission is to set up a ‘cloud-simulation chamber’ at the IITM, which will help model rain clouds. They would then test various “weather interventions” such as seeding clouds and tweaking them to control the rainfall from them. There are also plans to control lightning. As statistics reveal, lightning strikes are the number one cause of nature-propelled deaths, above floods and landslides, in India. While there are multiple socio-economic factors as to why this is so, meteorologists say they hope, one day, to be able to tweak the electrical characteristics of the cloud so that there are fewer lightning strikes that lethally traverse from sky to ground. While experiments have been done in other countries, there is much uncertainty on its feasibility. Investing in fundamental research in the atmospheric sciences is a welcome move. The complexities posed by climate change suggest that multiple fronts may have to be opened to mitigate the effects of greenhouse gas emissions. While weather modification may not be a panacea, it will not hurt to wholesomely understand it.