Know Your Monsoon

Who don’t like to enjoy the raindrops, perhaps i even don’t carry raincoat with me so that while returning from college (now from office) I can enjoy riding my bike if it is raining. Still I have often found people to feel like the Information/News related to rain, thunderstorm or cyclone are not on provided time.

By the way the pic I have shown is captured at Mount Abu, Its a worm with water droplets stick to its hair.

Coming back to topic… some of my friends don’t like to get wet in rain and often say “Yaar ye barish ka kabhi koi bharosa nahi hota... kabhi bhi aa jati hai!! kash koi pehle se bata deta.!!”.

Sometimes when it rains, the next day we read in news paper that IMD (Indian Meteorological Department) has said that rain is likely to continue for coming two days and people find no rain during those two days.

Is it like Indian Meteorological Department is not able to predict the Monsoon activities.? 

First let me give you a brief introduction to the IMD so called Indian Meteorological Department. IMD was formed on 1875 and comes under Indian Ministry Of Earth Sciences. IMD is headquartered in New Delhi and operates hundreds of observation stations across India and Antarctica.

IMD is also one of the six Regional Specialized Meteorological Centers of the World Meteorological Organization. It has the responsibility for forecasting, naming and distribution of warnings for tropical cyclones in the Northern Indian Ocean region, including the Malacca Straits, the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf.

Satellites Contributing to India Meteorological Department

Satellite	Launch Date	Launch Vehicle	Description
NSAT-1A	10-Apr-82	Delta 3910 PAM-D	First operational multipurpose communication and meteorology satellite. Procured from USA. Worked for only six months.
INSAT-2E	3-Apr-99	Ariane-42P H10-3	Multipurpose communication and meteorological satellite.
Kalpana-1(METSAT)	12-Sep-02	PSLV-C4	First meteorological satellite built by ISRO. Originally named METSAT. Renamed after Kalpana Chawla who perished in the Space Shuttle Columbia.
INSAT-3A	10-Apr-03	Ariane-5G	Multipurpose satellite for communication, broadcasting, and meteorological services along with INSAT-2E and Kalpana-1.

Coming again to the Question:

Is it like Indian Meteorological Department is not able to predict the Monsoon activities.?

Indeed, it is amazing how little weather information we get on our news. That  being said, the IMD cannot be criticized. In the interests of simplicity, it tries to  provide a concise prediction. One can safely say that about 70% of our predictions would be close to the actual onset of monsoon within the span of 4 days.

I urge all my friends to have a look into IMD’s official website before stepping outside in rainy days. In one look i agree that its is loaded with collection of data from all IMD centers across India such that a normal user can get confused about what to look and where to look, but for ease you can track below link where the satellite image is updated about every 3 hours.

http://www.imd.gov.in/section/satmet/dynamic/insatsector-ir.htm

Source: wikipedia.com, imd.gov.in