Apropos the editorial “Guessing the monsoon” (February 23), it is surprising that though the Indian government launched the Megha-Tropiques satellite in October 2011 with French collaboration to study monsoon patterns, the current supercomputing resources are inadequate for long-term predictions. In the absence of technological upgrades restricting all-India forecasts, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) in collaboration with the agriculture ministry must identify the most vulnerable agrarian locations and produce localised models so that timely preventive steps could be taken. The editorial also highlights that the IMD model lags global modelling systems by two or three months and reducing this gap should be an imperative for better planning. In the meantime, it would do no harm to hone our contingency planning skills based on international data, which would certainly have accounted for multi-year regional weather patterns like El Nino and La Nina to back their claims.
Sudipta Das
Kolkata
Letters can be mailed, faxed or e-mailed to:
The Editor, Business Standard
Nehru House, 4 Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg
New Delhi 110 002
Fax: (011) 23720201
E-mail: letters@bsmail.in
All letters must have a postal address and telephone number
