Private weather forecasters are misguiding, says IMD Chief

Says it is not possible to be 100% accurate with monsoon prediction

The director general of the India Meteorological Department (IMD) has stated that private weather forecasters are misleading stake holders.

“It is a democratic country and private forecasters have a role to play. But I would just say, how can they predict? To some extent, they are misguiding, which is very unfortunate,” L S Rathore told Business Standard recently.

India's first private forecaster, Skymet, which started its country operations in 2003, has often had differences in its forecasts with those of the Met department. This was also witnessed this year, when on June 16, IMD declared the monsoon had covered all parts of the country. However, Skymet differed. The private forecaster termed it a pre-monsoon shower. The Met department had then fired back at Skymet, saying they had little knowledge in this domain.

Recently, while every foreign forecaster termed Phailin a ‘super cyclone’, the Met department had said it cannot be termed as one and got its assessment right.

On a question as to why can't the Met department predict the long range monsoon with the same accuracy, Rathore told Business Standard, “You cannot be completely correct, no matter what happens."

He said it was a challenging task to address the uncertainty in situations that will take place five months ahead of a forecast.

He stated if a wrong decision was taken by stakeholders on a bad forecast, there are medium-term measures that can be taken to correct these. “If you know you now have a weak forecast, there should be someone to communicate that the sowing of a particular crop will not be possible, hence, the farmer moves this seed to some other location or even decides to do away with the crop,” said the IMD chief.

He said the weather department works with Agromet advisory service, along with various state agricultural universities and constantly informs 4.6 million farmers through mobile phones forsmooth flow of communication. “But I will still say that a 100 per cent accurate prediction of the monsoon is not possible at all,” Rathore said.