On Tuesday (14 January), Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched ‘Mission Mausam’ to make India a ‘Weather-ready and Climate-smart’ nation. “We have launched Mission Mausam to make India weather ready and climate smart… Meteorology offers the most important support for the disaster management capability of any country. To minimise the impact of natural disasters, we need to maximise the efficiency of meteorology,” he said.

Various advanced technologies, including cutting-edge weather surveillance technologies, will be developed under the  ‘Mission Mausam’. The initiative will also lead to the implementation of high-resolution atmospheric observations, next-generation radars and satellites, and high-performance computers. It will also focus on improving the understanding of weather and climate processes and provide air quality data to help strategise weather management and intervention in the long run.

Mission Mausam will have a budget of Rs 2,000 crore for the first two years of its implementation. It aims to establish 50 Doppler Weather Radars (DWR), 60 Radio Sonde/Radio Wind (RS/RW) stations, 100 disdrometers, 10 Wind Profilers, 25 radiometers, 1 Urban testbed, 1 Process testbed, 1 Ocean Research station and 10 Marine Automatic Weather Stations with upper air observation. India is also establishing a first-of-its-kind cloud chamber at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune. It will allow scientists to study the seed particles that form cloud droplets or ice particles sustainably.

The Mission will also ‘manage’ certain weather events and, on-demand, enhance or suppress rainfall, hail, fog and, later, lightning strikes. The ‘Mission Mausam’ will directly benefit key sectors from agriculture, aviation and defence to disaster management, tourism and health.

According to the Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES) Secretary, Dr M Ravichandran, Mission Mausam will improve forecasts on both spatial and temporal scales and air quality data and help strategize weather management/intervention in the long run. “By March 2026, we are looking at installing a wider network of radars, wind profilers, and radiometers for better observations. We also look forward to better understanding the physical processes and the science of weather forecasting. There will be improved data assimilation with increased ingestion of the observations. We will also fuse physics-based numerical models and data-driven AI/ML to improve the forecasts. We would witness more innovations, R&D and advancements in atmospheric sciences”, he said.

Three institutes of the MoES: IMD, NCMRWF and the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, will primarily implement Mission Mausam. These institutions will be supported by other MoES institutions (Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services and National Institute of Ocean Technology) along with collaborating national and international institutes, academia and industries.