Indian Metrological Department’s new weather app is what you need in your phones this monsoon. IMD has launched its first weather app, which is meant for the welfare of the general public.
“Mausam,” the new app is a weather forecasting application launched by the Indian Government. The Ministry of Earth Sciences, which came into existence in 2006, launched the app on the occasion of founder’s day. Dr. Harsh Vardhan is the honorable minister responsible for the department, and Y.S Chowdary is the minister of state.
The specialty of this app is that it provides you with a radar-based forecast every 10 minutes, which tells us about its accuracy.
Mausam offers five benefits – current temperature, humidity, wind acceleration, and wind direction for 200 towns, and the data gets revised eight times a day. There is news on sunrise, sunset, moonrise, and moonset as well, three hourly notifications of local weather phenomena and their emphasis issued for about 800 locations, and prediction of climate conditions for 450 cities for the past 24 hours and seven days.
There are also warnings handed out two times a day for all districts for the next five days in color code (red, orange, and yellow) to notify users of any severe and serious weather manifestations, and station-wise radar predictions are revamped in every 10 minutes. The app was formulated and generated concurrently by ICRISAT’s Digital Agriculture and Youth committee, Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) Pune, and the Indian Metrological Department. Anyone can avail of this app for free from the Google play store or from the ios store.
Earlier, IMD has launched an app named “Meghdoot,” which was exclusively made for farmers and agriculturalists. Meghdoot was a joint initiative of the IMD and Indian Council for Agriculture Research (ICAR) to bring all sorts of weather forecasts under a safe roof. Mainly customized for farmers, the app provides location, crop, and livestock specific weather based agro advisories to the farmers in their language. The user is allowed to choose a language of his own, and this is what makes it a handy app. Of course, not everybody living in remote areas is technology-friendly.
“Meghdoot was meant only for farmers. This is for everyone. The now-cast feature of this app will tell you if there will be rain, thunder, or any other severe weather in your area based on data from the nearest meteorological station. Otherwise, there will be city-based information and forecasts and even radar products,” said M Rajeevan, secretary in the ministry of earth sciences.
Magnifying on the forthcoming plans of MoES at an occasion held at New Delhi, Vardhan said, “Towards augmentation of our systems and services, MoES institutions will be incorporating Artificial Intelligence, Internet of Things, Machine Learning as part of the upgrading the weather forecasts, data gathering and analysis. A new High-Performance Computing (HPC) system will also be inducted by 2021.”
Dr. Harsh Vardhan explained that MoES needs more financial investment, at least twice more monetary assistance than what is currently provided so that the comprehensive services can be strengthened. He was heard saying, “I am aware of the lacunae and understand that twice the current budgets are needed. Replacement of old ships, better computer systems, and automation is required besides, most importantly, having trained manpower,” the minister added.
M Rajeevan, secretary, MoES, informed that the ministry had signed an MoU with Scripps Institute of Oceanography. This will encourage India and US confederations in ocean research in the future.