Will a single model help climate scientists make accurate predictions?
Nobody likes a bad monsoon, especially the government. Every time the monsoon fails, the country’s GDP goes down by 2-3 percent. The least the government wants to know is what the year’s rainfall is going to look like — something that has eluded meteorological departments across the country for decades. Now it seems the government has had enough. This August, the Ministry of Earth Sciences commissioned the National Monsoon Mission programme. It intends to spend about Rs. 400 crore to get the monsoon forecast right. The beauty of the idea lies in its simplicity: Get everybody together.
“Quite clearly there is a lack of focus and duplication of work. So what the mission states is that for long-range forecast, which is 15 days to three months, scientists have to work together on one model,” says M. Rajeevan, scientist at the National Atmospheric Research Laboratory.
(This story appears in the 09 September, 2011 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)