The Regional Meteorological Centre, Chennai, will add more automatic rain gauges to its observational network across the State to improve its weather monitoring and forecasting services.
It is finalising sites for the gauages. The project would help get real-time rainfall data and provide forecasts on weather events that may be unique to a region.
Officials of the India Meteorological Department said plans were afoot to add 10 more automatic rain gauges to the network. These would be installed in places that have low distribution of rain gauging stations in the State and not restricted to urban areas alone. Instruments have been received and the work to set up the rain gauges likely to begin in September.
The department would tie up with both government and private institutions, which would provide sufficient exposure to the sensors in the rain gauges for accurate observations, said an official.
At present, the RMC has a network of 45 automatic weather stations and about 80 automatic rain gauges along with manual observatories. Moreover, high wind speed recorders had been installed in 11 districts along the coastline.
In Chennai and its fringes, the RMC has upgraded its observational network to a minimum of four automatic weather stations and about 10 rain gauges to monitor the changes in urban environment. This includes the increasing incidences of intense rainfall within a span of a few hours in recent years.
The department is looking to create more awareness on its crowd sourcing portal to collect information on local weather conditions. Since August last year, nearly 311 people have shared information on various weather conditions such as rain, lightning and fog in their localities and on damages caused. Such details would help improve the weather database, validate weather models and develop location-specific forecasts, the officials added.
