Bharat Forecast System: Desi system to make forecasts more accurate

NEW DELHI: India on Monday operationalised its indigenously developed high-resolution numerical weather prediction model - called Bharat Forecast System - that will significantly improve forecast accuracy by enhancing the spatial resolution from existing 12 km to 6 km. It makes it the world’s first model at such a high resolution for localised forecasts.It means the forecast will now be available to a village level instead of the cluster of 4-5 villages under the existing system, enabling every village in the country to access more precise and location-specific forecasts. The high spatial resolution will make it possible for the India Meteorological Department (IMD) to forecast weather events which may take place in a grid of 6 km by 6 km in the tropical region that falls between 30 degrees South and 30 degrees North Latitudes. The similar numerical global models, currently run by the European, British and US weather offices, have a resolution between 9 km and 14 km. The Bharat Forecast System (BFS), developed by Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune, will improve the accuracy of extreme rainfall prediction by 30% and enhance the forecast accuracy of rainfall in the ‘monsoon core zone’ (areas where farming operations mainly depend on seasonal rains) by 64%, using real-time modeling based on the ‘Triangular Cubic Octahedral Grid model’. “This indigenous breakthrough positions India among global leaders in weather prediction... The efforts are Indian, the technology is Indian, and the beneficiaries are Indian. This is true ‘atmanirbharta’ (self-sufficiency). Moreover, this system will also benefit other tropical regions globally, which face the most complex and variable weather challenges,” said Union minister of earth sciences, Jitendra Singh, while unveiling the new system. Underlining that the BFS is being spearheaded by four women scientists, reflecting Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of ‘Nari Shakti’ (woman power), Singh said, “Science ministries no longer empower women. We are, in fact, being empowered by them.”The new forecasting model is backed by a new supercomputer ‘Arka’ with a capacity of 11.77 Peta FLOPS and storage capacity of 33 petabytes. It’s a big improvement over the previous supercomputer ‘Pratyush’ which used to take up to 10 hours to run the forecasting model. Arka, on the other hand, performs the same data-crunching within four hours. The High-Performance Computing (HPC) system, Arka, tailored for weather and climate research, is located at two key sites - IITM at Pune and the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) at Noida.“This indigenous breakthrough positions India among global leaders in weather prediction... The efforts are Indian, the technology is Indian, and the beneficiaries are Indian. This is true ‘atmanirbharta’ (self-sufficiency). Moreover, this system will also benefit other tropical regions globally, which face the most complex and variable weather challenges,” said Union minister of earth sciences, Jitendra Singh, while unveiling the new system. Underlining that the BFS is being spearheaded by four women scientists, reflecting Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vision of ‘Nari Shakti’ (woman power), Singh said, “Science ministries no longer empower women. We are, in fact, being empowered by them.”The new forecasting model is backed by a new supercomputer ‘Arka’ with a capacity of 11.77 Peta FLOPS and storage capacity of 33 petabytes. It’s a big improvement over the previous supercomputer ‘Pratyush’ which used to take up to 10 hours to run the forecasting model. Arka, on the other hand, performs the same data-crunching within four hours. The High-Performance Computing (HPC) system, Arka, tailored for weather and climate research, is located at two key sites - IITM at Pune and the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) at Noida.