Indo-US agreement to continue monsoon forecast collaboration

The Indian and American governments agreed on Sunday for the need to scale up their cooperation in helping the former accurately forecast monsoon rainfall, vital for the country's agriculture and economic growth.

Their joint statement said it was “agreed to continue U.S-India collaboration in hydrology and water studies and monsoon modelling, and noted the need to expeditiously work towards launching an Indo-US Climate Fellowship to facilitate human capacity building.” They already have a partnership to develop modern forecasting models in this regard. Officials said the US government had helped assist in developing a ‘Coupled Forecasting Version-2’ model to predict seasonal rainfall. This is being run for research purposes at the Pune-based Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology for the past three to four years. There are plans to alter and scale it up for operational use to predict the southwest monsoon. The US will cooperate in this.