Noida: The Union ministry of earth sciences on Tuesday launched a pilot weather forecasting system for UP that uses artificial intelligence to generate rainfall predictions for every one kilometre and project conditions up to 10 days in advance. The launch marks a significant leap from the district-level forecasts currently available.The system, ‘High Spatial Resolution Rainfall Forecast for Uttar Pradesh’, developed jointly by the India Meteorological Department (IMD), the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune, and the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF), dynamically converts hourly rainfall forecasts from an indigenous model at 12.5 km resolution, scaling down to 4 km and finally to an ultra-high 1 km resolution using AI-driven downscaling techniques.According to secretary (ministry of earth sciences) M Ravichandran, UP has sufficient numbers of automatic weather stations (AWS) and the system would integrate data from automatic rain gauges (ARGs) and AWSs, Doppler weather radars and satellite-based rainfall datasets to generate hyper-local weather forecasts.“It demonstrates the capability of generating operational rainfall forecasts at 1 km resolution using dense observational networks,” he said. The model is likely to be calibrated against real-time data before being extended to other states.The forecasts will be disseminated through the IMD and NCMRWF websites and mobile applications. Singh said the tool would serve agriculture, water resource management, disaster management, urban planning, renewable energy and infrastructure sectors. “Farmers will now be able to take more informed decisions on sowing, irrigation, crop protection and harvest planning with far greater local precision,” he said.The 10-day forecast window for every 1 km is also expected to help civic agencies shift the focus from being reactive to anticipatory. Local authorities in Lucknow, Ghaziabad or Noida could anticipate waterlogging hotspots, manage stormwater systems proactively and schedule road or construction work around rain windows with far greater precision, urban planning experts said.In the event of heavy rain or flooding, it could become easier to identify vulnerable localities, low-lying pockets and drainage-stressed zones in time for targeted evacuations and pre-positioning of relief, rather than blanket district-wide alerts, they added.Ramavatar Tyagi, a rose cultivator in Noida who lost standing flower stems to flooding last monsoon, said early forecasts could help farmers limit losses. “If there’s flooding, nothing helps. But if we know about rainfall in advance, we can make temporary arrangements or at least shift our livestock to safer places,” he said.Green activist Pradeep Kumar, who has filed cases in the NGT regarding overexploitation of groundwater by real estate developers and concretisation of greenbelts in Greater Noida, said the tool’s value would depend on administrative follow-through. “People living in the Yamuna and Hindon floodplains do not want to move even when there is a flood risk, but if the administration, equipped with a credible forecast, steps in, damage to life and property can be averted,” he said.
