TEAM HERALD
teamherald@herald-goa.com
PANJIM: To make more accurate weather forecasts, the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD), Western region, plans to adopt paperless recording of weather data at its Goa observatory on a trial basis, which will be put on the global network.
Goa observatory in-charge K V Singh said that IMD is working on such plan but was unaware of the timing of its launch in Goa.
“At present we are sending information via computer. The data is collected through automatic rain gauge (ARG) system,” he said.
Starting November, the Regional Meteorological Centre (RMC), Mumbai will begin automation of observatories in Maharashtra and Goa that will start logging their weather data through an indigenously designed handheld device on a three-hourly real time basis.
The decision to launching the pilot project was taken at a meeting in Mumbai earlier this month, and if successful this would be replicated at other Indian observatories from March 23, 2014.
The software for the handheld data logger with Global System for Mobile (GSM) connectivity is been developed by the Society for Applied Microwave Electronics Engineering and Research at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.
The touch-screen device can save one-year data for temperature, rainfall, humidity, wind speed, wind direction, current weather and past weather.
Source from weather department said ‘once weather data is logged at weather stations, it will be sent to RMC-Mumbai, where values will be rechecked. From here it will be sent to National Data Centre, Pune, from where it will be uploaded on global weather networks’.
