Thiruvananthapuram: The Indian Meteorological Department and the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) have offered to equip and update the state’s weather stations as a follow-up of their commitment post-floods. The ISRO is expected to engage with Kerala State Emergency Operations Centre and equip Kerala State Disaster Management Authority with a locally customised National Database on Emergency Management, housed in the KSEOC server. It could also assist KSEOC in improving extreme weather monitoring, extreme weather warning and natural hazard impact forecasting in Kerala.
Officials of the ISRO and the State government are expected to meet in April. They met the State Relief Commissioner and SDMA officials last month. Once the details are worked out it would take a year for implementing the project.
ISRO officials had met Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan during the floods when they committed to undertake the massive modernisation programme so that the state gets the latest weather and natural hazard prediction models. ISROs at present dysfunctional 69 automatic weather stations (AWS) deployed in the state will be reactivated based on the request of the state and the state has already started working on this offer of ISRO.
IMD has a network of 78 daily rain gauge stations. As the state raised complaints to ministry of home affairs under the Disaster Management Act, IMD has offered to set up 100 AWS and have requested the state to provide land area of 10 m x 10 m each to deploy them. The government has sought the status report on the present stations, so that a decision could be taken on additional locations to deploy AWS. 39 automated rain gauges and 10 AWS at pilgrim centres or tourist destinations will also be deployed by IMD.
The ISRO had facilitated the flood mapping from National Remote Sensing Centre during the Kerala Floods 2018 and subsequently equipped fishermen with NAVIC system.
Later, the state government urged the services and support of ISRO in upgrading the extreme weather monitoring, extreme weather warning and natural hazard impact forecasting in Kerala.
The Kerala State Emergency Operations Centre of Kerala State Disaster Management Authority have the requisite technical human resource and backend incident management system based on IBM Intelligent Operations Centre platform.
The system requires multiple modelling outputs in CAP formats for at least village level warning issuance. Multi-input ensemble weather forecasting, flood forecasting, landslide forecasting and drought forecasting are the services that the Government expects from the ISRO.
The government had several times requested the National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC) for housing a local version of the National Database on Emergency Management (NDEM) in the KSEOC and provide extended local warning issuance system as part of NDEM for the State.
