The country is all set to get its first dedicated Thunderstorm Research Testbed project by 2026, Earth Sciences Minister Kiren Rijiju told the Lok Sabha on Wednesday. The project will be centred on the southern parts of Gangetic West Bengal, east Jharkhand, and north Odisha.
The project was envisaged in the wake of the increasing mortality due to extreme weather events including the highly damaging thunderstorms and lightning across major parts of India, especially the eastern states of Odisha, Jharkhand, and Bihar. According to media reports, over 700 people died due to thunderstorms and lightning in the country in 2022. Bihar bore the maximum brunt, losing over 180 lives, followed by Jharkhand (62), and Uttar Pradesh (64).
The eastern region including West Bengal has recorded an increasing occurrence of thunderstorms, especially during the April-May period, which have also become more severe amid the changing climate conditions.
The minister said the project will help the India Meteorological Department (IMD) to understand the formation, growth, and propagation of thunderstorms over the eastern part of India, and use that science of understanding to improve the existing models and their operational forecast capability.
As a part of this project, the ministry has proposed to purchase two drones for monitoring weather parameters of the atmospheric boundary layer prior to the occurrence of thunderstorms and also for post-event observation of damages.
“The Thunderstorm Research Testbed project is not a stand-alone project. It is being planned so as to complement the already existing atmospheric observation infrastructure over East India. The project will also benefit from additional infrastructure being planned in the region under the planned schemes of the Ministry of Earth Sciences,” said the union minister.
The weather department currently provides a three-hour Nowcast warning for thunderstorms for all major towns and cities across 732 districts, apart from the five-day impact-based forecast. It uses the ground-based lightning array network of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune, and the Indian Air Force, to verify the district-level Nowcasts.
Apart from expanding the network of automatic weather stations across the country, the IMD also recently commissioned four Doppler Weather Radars at Lansdowne, Banihal, Murari Devi, Jot, and Surkanda Devi, taking the total number of DWRs to 39.
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