PUNE: Soon, India will have access to better weather prediction services.
The
Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES) has recently enhanced its computational capacity 6.8 petaflops at two MoES institutes, Pune-based
Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) and the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) in Noida.
The high-performance computing facility, to be inaugurated at IITM on Monday by Union minister Harsh Vardhan, will be used for carrying out research on improving weather and climate prediction, and their applications. This facility will also be utilized by other MoES institutes for research activities, to improve their respective weather and climate services.
The NCMRWF facility will be used mainly to cater to daily operational forecasts of MoES institutes. With the new supercomputer, India will jump from 368th to the top 30 HPC facilities in the world. In terms of dedicated HPC resources for the weather and climate community, India will be ranked fourth, below the United
Kingdom, United States of America and
Japan, an IITM source said.
"The MoES augmented its computational capacity up to 4 petaflops at IITM, Pune, and 2.8 petaflops at NCMRWF. With this augmentation, MoES's high-performance computing facility will be India's best in terms of peak capacity and performance," the source said.
The facility is expected to generate improved weather forecasts at block level over India — extreme weather events, high-resolution seasonal and extended range forecasts of active and break spells in monsoon, very high-resolution coupled models for prediction of cyclones with more accuracy and lead time, tsunami forecasts with greater lead time, air quality forecasts for different smart cities and climate projections at a very high resolution.
