National Monsoon Mission

About Monsoon Mission

The Indian summer (southwest) monsoon is referred as lifeline of India, as ariability in any of its aspects (onset, withdrawal and quantum of rainfall) greatly influences the agriculture yield, economy, water resources, power generation and ecosystem. Hence, if the variations in monsoon rainfall are known well in advance, it would be possible to reduce the adverse impacts related to excess or deficient rainfall, providing us prior information about droughts and floods. The accurate prediction of monsoon rainfall is a basic need for the nation but remained a challenge over the decades. The long range prediction of the seasonal mean monsoon rainfall depends on dynamics of its year-to-year variations. Recent improvements in dynamical numerical models with ocean-atmosphere coupling can be useful for improvement of the monsoon forecast skill through a collective effort.

Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES), Government of India launched 'National Monsoon Mission' (NMM) in 2012 with a vision to develop a state-of-the-art dynamical prediction system for monsoon rainfall on different time scales.

Objectives

• To improve Seasonal and Intra-seasonal Monsoon Forecast
• To improve Medium Range Forecast.

Implementation agencies

MoES has bestowed the responsibility of execution and coordination of this mission to the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune. For this national mission, IITM is collaborating with NCEP (USA), MoES organisations and various academic institutions/organizations under NMM.

Targets

Following are the targets of Monsoon Mission:

• Development of a seamless prediction system using monsoon mission model, on different time scales, like Seasonal (for whole Monsoon season), Extended range (up-to 4 weeks), Short range prediction (up-to 5days).
• Initiate and coordinate working partnership between Indian and foreign institutes to develop a system for prediction of extremes and climate applications
• Develop and implement system for climate applications having social impacts (such as agriculture, flood forecast, extreme events forecast, wind energy, etc.)
• Advanced data assimilation system for preparing high quality data for model predictions.

Impact

Under the Monsoon Mission, Ministry has developed the state-of-the-art weather and climate prediction models, which are now in operational use. These models include models for short range to medium range (1-10 days), extended range (10days to 30 days) and seasonal (up to one season). The models developed under the National Monsoon Mission (NMM) have shown very high skill in predicting important weather events on different time scales during the last 3 years.

 National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) has made a study that examines the economic benefits of investments made by the Ministry of Earth Sciences in the National Monsoon Mission (NMM) and High Performance Computing (HPC) facilities and their role in improving the accuracy of monsoonal rainfall predictions.

It has indicated that for every rupee spent by the government on the National Monsoon Mission and High-performance Computing programs of the Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES), the country would gain economic benefits worth fifty rupees, which is 50 times more benefit on the investment over the next five years period.  To access the report, click here. 

Source :Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, India