Changing weather
barely a year after the country witnessed how wrong meteorological data can hamper reliable weather forecasting, the Indian Space Research Organisation (isro) has claimed a major feat in the field. On March 18, 2005, it announced that it had designed and developed the prototype of an automatic weather station (aws) that can not only record vital rainfall, temperature and wind data, but also transmit the same to a central location in a fraction of a second.
The wide gap in the actual amount of rainfall from the Southwest Monsoon and what was predicted by the India Meteorological Department (imd) in 2004 was linked to falty data that came from nearly 550 meteorological observatories, most of them outdated and manually operated. This had led to Union science and technology minister Kapil Sibal announcing a onetime grant of Rs 500 crore to improve weather data collection (See Down To Earth,
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