This implies, if Delhi or every other metropolis needs to suppress rains throughout, say, I-Day celebrations, scientists would have the ability to do it by means of interventions. Equally, rain/ hail may be suppressed in cities throughout floods.“We need to go for preliminary experimental synthetic rain suppression and enhancement. Lab simulations will likely be executed within the subsequent 18 months, however we’ll positively go for synthetic climate modification within the five-year ti me scale,” mentioned M Ravichandran, secretary, earth sciences ministry (MoES), on Thursday elaborating on Mission Mausam, which obtained the Cupboard’s nod a day earlier.
Requested if rains could possibly be suppressed over Delhi on August 15 (Independence Day), Ravichandran responded: “We will consider it (by means of climate modification)”.
Beneath the Mission Mausam mandate, scientists may also work on incremental enchancment of climate forecast techniques within the nation when it comes to additional elevating forecast accuracy by 5-10%. Beneath the Mission, which goals to make India climate-smart and weather-ready by not letting any climate phenomena, together with even cloud burst, stay undetected, India Meteorological Division (IMD) together with different scientific establishments of the MoES may also develop and launch ‘Mausam GPT‘, a chatGPT like software, that can assist customers to get fast weather-related info in each written and audio kind within the subsequent 5 years.
Suppression and enhancement of rain methods are already getting used by means of cloud seeding, utilizing plane, in a restricted approach within the US, Canada, China, Russia and Australia amongst others. There have been cloud seeding tasks, known as overseeding, aimed toward decreasing hail so as to forestall injury to fruit orchards and grain fields in a few these international locations.
“Cloud seeding and cloud modification is a posh course of. We have now executed numerous experiments with cloud seeding to boost rain with restricted success. However not a lot has been executed on cloud suppression,” Madhavan Rajeevan, former MoES secretary, instructed TOI. He mentioned although there’s a scope in India for climate modification, its science will not be effectively understood and know-how is advanced. “For my part, we must always begin doing analysis in climate modification and we want investments,” mentioned Rajeevan.
Govt has initially authorised Rs 2,000 crore over two years for the Mission Mausam to create a extra sturdy forecasting system for coping with the impacts of excessive climate occasions and local weather change. Later, extra funds will likely be earmarked for it.
India is already experimenting with synthetic rain making methods and have executed some pilot tasks in Maharashtra and elsewhere.