U’khand to get 107 automatic weather stations by Oct

Uttarakhand is most likely to get all 107 automatic weather stations, surface field observatory with the combination of optical gauge and others, automatic rain gauges, and snow gauges by the month of October this year. Once installed, they would help the state get more accurate information about the weather conditions. As per the information, various places in the blocks of the State have been selected for the setup and in some, the work of installing the stations has already been started.

The automatic weather station is a version of the traditional weather station, which is capable to measure accurate reading of temperature, wind speed, wind direction, humidity and atmospheric pressure. The radius of the device is approximately in the range five km which is able to give accurate numerical weather prediction. The machine gives information using General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) and satellites, which help the gadget to give information in every 15 and 20 minutes. Each machine costs around Rs eight to 10 lakh. 

Informing about it, the director of State Meteorological Centre Bikram Singh said on Monday, “The proposal of installing automatic weather station was part of the State Government’s policy. The State Met Centre has been working to give technical support. We inspected the places where they would be set up. Due to the monsoon and transportation issues, the process of setting them up has been going slowly. We hope that the process of setting up the automatic weather stations would be completed by the end of October this year.”

Dwelling on the help to be provided by the automatic weather stations, he said, “Setting of automatic weather station will be very helpful for us. Being a State in which we frequently face weather deviation, the accurate numerical weather prediction will give us a data more accurate. We will be able to predict cloudburst and heavy rainfall in many areas.

One Doppler radar which we are most likely to get either in January or February will be immensely helpful. Both the equipments once installed would help us forecast  the weather of various places, especially during the monsoon season, accurately. Currently, the system of observation is poor but it will improve after their installation.” Dehradun has one automatic weather station installed in the campus of the Survey of India.

The executive director of Uttarakhand Disaster Mitigation and Management Centre (DMMC) Piyush Rautela said, “Around 107automatic weather station, 25 surface field observatories with the combination of optical rain gauge and others, 28 automatic rain gauges and 16 snow gauges are going to set up in the State.

The work has been started, but  the monsoon is coming in the way. We are confident that the devices will start providing the expected help perfectly from next year.”