Why Delhi-NCR cities don't get weather data right

NOIDA: How much did it rain in the city today?
You aren't the only one who doesn't have a clear answer. The weatherman, too, quite often doesn't.
Though Noida and Ghaziabad have developed into residential and economic hubs over the years, weather is still measured from a handful of old stations that are prone to snags. As a result, there's often no real-time data on rainfall and temperature.
So, it may rain heavily in Noida, flooding roads, but if the weather stations have not captured data that day, what you'll likely see are readings from the Safdarjung observatory, which is Delhi's base station. Private apps on the phone do give readings but those don't have the same standardisation as IMD data does.
Dr Mrutyunjay Mohapatra, director general of meteorology at the India Meteorological Department (IMD), said Noida has four automatic weather monitoring systems at Sector 62, Sector 125, Knowledge Park 3 and Knowledge Park 4, while Ghaziabad has three at Vasundhara, Indirapuram and Loni. Even though these systems provide data on average temperature, wind speed and humidity, they often fail to provide real-time data on the minimum and maximum temperatures and rainfall due to technical glitches.
The weather station at the National Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting in Sector 62 has rusted poles and sits amid an overgrowth of grass and shrubs. An official there said that though the station is on its campus, "it comes under IMD". "It is not under our department. IMD does its maintenance and operations," the official said.
The Regional Meteorological Centre (RMC) in Delhi shares the Delhi-NCR maximum and minimum temperatures, humidity and rainfall data daily based on updates from weather stations across the cities in the region. But on the days the Noida and Ghaziabad stations don't function at 100%, the relevant data goes missing from the website.
For instance, last Thursday, RMC shared data from Palam, Lodhi Road, Najafgarh, Pitampura, Pusa and Mayur Vihar in Delhi and Gurgaon. Only the maximum temperature for Ghaziabad was available, while Noida had no data.
An IMD official said when the automatic weather stations in Noida and Ghaziabad update data, it gets reflected on the RMC-Delhi website. "It appears there are some technical issues in the stations, and hence, the data did not get reflected on Thursday," he said.
Similarly, the weather data from sectors 125 and 62 stations in Noida and Indirapuram station in Ghaziabad was unavailable on Friday.
A professor in the department of environmental science at Jamia Millia Islamia said, "The IMD uses data from these stations for larger goals like analysing temperatures, rainfall, and climate change over a while." But with inadequacies in the functionality of the weather stations in Noida-Ghaziabad, big-picture weather studies on rainfall patterns and mapping changes also get impacted.
Mohapatra said the IMD is planning to strengthen the weather monitoring system in NCR. "We have planned to develop a manual observation system in the area. The automatic stations, which have become old and obsolete, will be replaced."
Delhi, on the other hand, has 13 observation stations - five manual and eight automatic.