Met Office Set To Go Hi-Tech

Supercomputers, equipped weather monitoring stations, will be set up in different agro-meteorological zones all over the country to augment the lone unit of the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) in the capital.

The 1998-99 Budget has hinted at augmenting the single IMD centre to improve accuracy of weather monitoring and to lead to precise monsoon forecasts.

A sum of Rs 12.73 crore has been earmarked for the Meteorological Department's expansion plans.

While the location of the new centres are not known, the country can be broadly divided into four agro-meteorological divisions - the Northern Gangetic plain, the Eastern Terai region, the Deccan Plateau and the Coastal region.

The new centres could be in any one or four divisions.

The new centres will be linked with state-of-the-art communication links to the Delhi centre.

They are expected to make more data available, enabling scientists to issue precise forecasts and advanced notice for cyclones and other unusual weather build ups.

While the meteorological department has made fairly accurate forecasts, scientists concede that their predictions could improve if they had access to additional data collected from various centres with real time processing abilities.

The Meteorological Department is currently equipped with a vintage Cray supercomputer and is looking to upgrade it with a modern system.

The Centre for Development for Advanced Computing (C-DAC) has run the monsoon software code on its Param range of machines and is eyeing the IMD as a likely buyer of its systems.

However, US giant Silicon Graphics, which has bought over Cray Supercomputers is trying to sell its systems to the IMD.

It has even submitted a proposal to upgrade the old Cray into its latest generation giga-flop number crunching machine.

The post Pokharan sanctions will make it difficult for Silicon Graphics to sell high performance machines to India.

Even before the sanctions the US State department had imposed a ceiling of 2000 million floating point operations (mflops) per second, requiring special US government clearance for export to India.

The 2000 mflops range is way below the latest generation Cray prowess.