Four years after finalising a ‘test-bed site’ to study the Indian monsoon, only nine of the total 25 requisite instruments have been installed till September, the response to a Right to Information (RTI) application filed by The Indian Express has revealed.
According to the RTI response, procurement of an instrument for measuring solar radiation is still in process, whereas another instrument for studying winds, planned in partnership with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), is still in the planning stage.
India receives 70 per cent of its annual rainfall from June to September. Increasing unpredictability in rainfall distribution is leading to extreme situations like floods or droughts , posing a threat to the food and water security of the agrarian country. This year, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand were among rainfall deficient states at the end of the monsoon season.
With monsoon becoming more erratic in nature, the need for more focused studies of the monsoon was felt.
Aimed to improve monsoon forecasts and carrying out dedicated monsoon studies, the Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES), in 2018, decided to establish a test-bed facility near Bhopal to mainly study monsoon winds, clouds and synoptic systems (low-pressure, depression, etc.) passing via the core monsoon zone — near Bhopal in central India.
Accordingly, an MoU was signed between the Pune-based Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) and Madhya Pradesh Council of Science and Technology in New Delhi in January 2018. The MoU is set to expire in January 2023.
The long-term experiment site is expected to cost Rs 125 crore to set up. It will house high-end weather instruments, allowing climate scientists to study the properties, convection processes in cloud, precipitation and land-atmosphere interaction over this zone.
As areas around Madhya Pradesh’s Bhopal are located directly in the path of rain-bearing systems like low-pressure systems or depressions, the location is ideal to study their characteristics. In addition, scientists can also take observations of associated clouds and their properties, whose information, when incorporated into numerical weather models, can help improve forecasts of both rain-bearing systems and monsoons in general.
Until last month, only nine of the total 25 instruments had been installed at the site. A 75-metre-tall tower mounted with instruments, meant for measuring atmospheric and greenhouse gas measurements, and an Automatic Weather Station (AWS) also have to be set up.
The remaining 16 uninstalled instruments include a terrestrial radiation measuring instrument, whose procurement process is still on; a wind profiler for creation of vertical wind profiles of all wind-related components, which is being planned in collaboration with Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO); an aerosol chemical speciation monitor; single particle soot photometer; sun or sky radiometer; instruments to measure direct, diffused, total and terrestrial radiations, soil moisture and temperature.
While the commissioning of the first phase is scheduled in December this year, full-scale operations will begin only in March 2026, subject to budget provisions, revealed the RTI reply.