Ramanathapuram:Tamil Nadu: 21 December 2023: Rain lashing in Ramanathapuram and surrounding areas on Thursday.
| Photo Credit: L. Balachandar/The Hindu
India is testing synthetic intelligence (AI) to construct local weather fashions to enhance weather forecasting as torrential rains, floods and droughts proliferate throughout the huge nation, a high weather official mentioned.
Global warming has triggered extra intense clashes of weather programs in India in current years, rising excessive weather occasions, which the impartial Centre for Science and Environment estimates have killed practically 3,000 folks this yr.
Weather businesses all over the world are focussing on AI, which may deliver down value and enhance pace, and which Britain’s Met Office says might “revolutionise” weather forecasting, with a current Google-funded mannequin discovered to have outperformed standard strategies.
Accurate weather forecasting is especially essential in India, a rustic of 1.4 billion folks, many impoverished, and the world’s second-largest producer of rice, wheat and sugar.
The India Meteorological Department (IMD) supplies forecasts based mostly on mathematical fashions utilizing supercomputers. Using AI with an expanded remark community might assist generate higher-quality forecast knowledge at decrease value.
The division expects the AI-based local weather fashions and advisories it’s creating to assist enhance forecasts, Ok.S. Hosalikar, head of local weather analysis and companies at IMD, advised Reuters.
The weather workplace has used AI to generate public alerts relating to heatwaves and such ailments as malaria, Hosalikar mentioned. It plans to increase weather observatories, offering knowledge all the way down to village degree, doubtlessly providing higher-resolution knowledge for forecasts, he mentioned.
The authorities mentioned on Thursday it desires to generate weather and local weather forecasts by incorporating AI into conventional fashions, and has arrange a centre to check the concept by workshops and conferences.
“An AI model doesn’t require the high cost involved in running a supercomputer – you can even run it out of a good quality desktop,” mentioned Saurabh Rathore, an assistant professor at Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi.
Better knowledge can be wanted to take advantage of out of AI, specialists say.
“Without having high-resolution data in space and time, no AI model for location-specific magnification of existing model forecasts is feasible,” mentioned Parthasarathi Mukhopadhyay, a local weather scientist on the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology.
