Recently, the Union Cabinet has approved ‘Mission Mausam’ with an outlay of Rs.2,000 crore over two years.
- The “Mission Mausam” aims to improve weather understanding and forecasting through expanded observation networks, better modelling and advanced tools like AI and machine learning.
- The mission will explore “weather management” technologies and include creating a laboratory to artificially develop clouds, increasing the number of radars by over 150 per cent and adding new satellites, supercomputers and much more. The five-year mission would be implemented in two phases.
- The first phase, which runs until March 2026, will focus on expanding the observation network. This includes adding around 70 Doppler radars, high-performance computers and setting up 10 wind profilers and 10 radiometers.
- The second phase will focus on adding satellites and aircraft to further enhance observational capabilities.
Mission Mausam objectives
- Mission Mausam aims to improve short to medium range weather forecast accuracy by five to 10 per cent and enhance air quality prediction in all major metro cities by up to 10 per cent.
- It will enable weather prediction up to the panchayat level with a lead time of 10 to 15 days and improve the nowcast frequency from three hours to one hour.
- A nowcast provides a very short-term prediction, usually for the next few hours. It is useful for tracking fast-changing weather events such as thunderstorms, heavy rain or snow.
Weather management and cloud chamber
- The “weather management” means actively changing the weather using cloud seeding. The latter involves spraying clouds with appropriate chemicals to increase or decrease their water-carrying capacity. Plans are also afoot to control lightning.
- Meteorologists say they hope one day to be able to tweak the electrical characteristics of the cloud so that there are less lightning strikes that lethally traverse from sky to ground.
- To this end, a “cloud chamber” will be established at the Indian Institute of Meteorology in Pune within the next one and a half years under the mission to study the processes occurring within clouds in the context of rising temperatures.
- Rising temperatures lead to clouds becoming taller and more electrically active, while their horizontal spread may shrink. This can result in stronger thunderstorms and more frequent lightning events and impact rainfall dynamics.
- The cloud chamber will artificially create clouds inside a laboratory at the IITM and conduct experiments.
- This will help the scientists better understand these processes and figure out which types of clouds can be seeded (a process where substances are added to clouds to make them produce rain), what materials should be used for seeding and how much seeding is needed to either increase rain or even prevent rain.
- The insights gained from the cloud chamber will also help improve the parameterization of weather models, supporting the indigenization of these model.
- The Ministry of Earth Sciences also aims to artificially enhance or suppress rain and hail within the next five years. After that, focus will on the other weather phenomena like lightning.
Cloud seeding
- Cloud seeding involves dispersing substances into the air to encourage condensation, resulting in precipitation.
- The most common substances used for cloud seeding include silver iodide, potassium iodide and dry ice (solid carbon dioxide).
- These agents provide the nuclei around which water vapour can condense, ultimately leading to the formation of rain or snow.
- This weather modification technique has been utilised in several parts of the world, primarily in the regions experiencing water scarcity or drought conditions. Some of the countries and states that have employed the cloud seeding technology include the US, China, Australia and the UAE.
(Sources: ET and The Hindu)
