Infra adds to IMD’s forecast woes
Hindustan TimesOn June 28, Delhi encountered, without warning, a record-breaking spell of rain that led to an absolute collapse of infrastructure in the city. Days later, however, IMD officials said that the intense spell of rain was “impossible to forecast”, as it rained down over a highly confined spatial area at Safdarjung. Misses, misses and more misses Ever since the monsoon arrived, not only has IMD been getting its daily forecasts wrong for Delhi, its short-term forecasts – meant for the next four to six hours – are also impacted, with the Met department revising its daily weather bulletins for Delhi multiple times a single day. The forecast for July 1 on June 30 was again “moderate to heavy”, but Delhi received zero rainfall that day, making all three forecasts wrong. In case of Ayanagar, we are seeing nowcasts or alerts issued by the time it has already started raining, as it is not able to capture cloud movement from afar,” said Mahesh Palawat, vice president at Skymet meteorology, stating a combination of both weather models and short-term DWRs forecasts were not giving the desired results.