India To Feed Nasa With Satellite Weather Data

India has agreed to feed the US National Aeronautical And Space Administration with real-time weather satellite data even as Washington recently announced fresh curbs on selling high-speed computers to New Delhi.

In return for real-time weather data, the US will provide access to stored data from its weather monitoring satellites to fine-tune Indian weather data interpretation. NASA will use Indias real-time data to develop global weather models for its own use.

It is not known if the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) will have access to the processed real-time Indian data even as an Indo-US two-day workshop on weather data sourcing and interpretation began here yesterday. IMD and NASA scientists participated in the meet, which was a follow-up to an agreement signed in Washington two months ago on sharing satellite-gathered data relating to weather monitoring.

 

The US curbs on obtaining prior State Department approval for sales of high power computers to India, which was announced recently, is expected to delay several sales to Indian scientific users, including the IMD. US companies like Silicon Graphics and IBM are in the race to provide a modern replacement to the ageing Cray supercomputer that the IMD uses at its national facility here.

Meanwhile, a Press Trust of India report said a controversy over an Indo-US agreement signed two months ago on transfer of Insat satellite weather data raised dust yesterday with the IMD expelling press reporters from a conference that began here to discuss projects to be taken up under the agreement.

In an unprecedented move, IMD director-general R R Kelkar asked reporters to leave amidst protests. An IMD spokesman declined to answer questions whether the discussions were secret.

Under the agreement signed in Washington in December last, India is to provide Insat data to the US on a near real-time basis that is, as the data reaches IMD. IMD has refused to make the agreement public.

Although the US has been demanding this data for 13 years, successive governments have been refusing to do so on the advice of defence scientists, who considered some of the weather and ocean data as being militarily sensitive.