There has been no delay in disseminating early warning information by the India Meteorological Department (IMD) regarding various natural disasters, including heavy rainfall events, floods, and cyclones, in States such as Gujarat, Odisha, and Kerala. The IMD has consistently issued timely alerts and forecasts to the public and concerned stakeholders. The Central Water Commission (CWC) is mandated to issue short-range flood forecasts with a lead time of up to 24 hours to concerned State Governments at identified locations. Timely flood forecasts are being issued when a certain threshold limit is reached.
IMD follows standard global best practice and operating procedures to deliver effective and efficient weather and climate forecasting services to the nation. The skill of the operational forecasts issued by IMD for various extreme weather and climate events is comparable to other national meteorological services of developed countries in the world. Overall, there has been significant improvement in the forecasting of various severe weather events like cyclones and heavy rainfall over the country during recent years (details about the IMD forecast accuracy are given in Annexure-1).
IMD uses a state-of-the-art dissemination system to share all severe weather information and early warning with Disaster Management Authorities as well as the general public through various platforms for necessary preparedness and to support mitigation measures. It includes Social media, Sachet-Apps via Common Alert Protocol (CAP), Mobile Apps, WhatsApp, and API. As a result, the vulnerable population gets evacuated from the damage-prone areas in a timely manner to safe shelters, thereby reducing the human death toll to a bare minimum. For this, IMD is issuing a seamless forecasting system at seasonal to nowcast scale and has implemented a well-defined Standard Operation Procedure for monitoring & forecasting the weather hazards and issuing impact-based warnings in consultation with NDMA, SDMA, and other various user agencies like Aviation, power, Railways, etc.
IMD has adopted new techniques and technology from time to time to detect, monitor, and provide timely early warnings (for the entire country, including coastal and rural communities) for all types of extreme weather events like cyclones, floods, and heatwaves, which have devastating impacts on human lives, livelihoods, and infrastructure. There has been significant progress in this direction with:
- Strengthening of the observing system with installation of additional AWS, ARG, and DWR, etc.
- Improvement of the data integration and development of GIS-based DSS.
- Improvement of NWP models and climate models, as well as a real-time seamless monitoring, forecasting, and early warning system.
- Shifting from conventional weather forecast and warning to sector-specific color-coded Impact-based forecast (IBF) and risk-based warning (RBW) upto district/sub-city levels with dynamical impact and risk matrix
- Application of AI/ML
- Customisation of bulletins and warnings
- Substantial increase of computational power to integrate voluminous data and to run meso-scale, regional, and global models at a further higher resolution scale with improvement of process understanding and model physics. Supercomputers (Arka and Arunika) are being used for this purpose.
- Panchayat Mausam Seva.
- A state-of-the-art dissemination system with the use of a mobile app, Common Alerting Protocol (CAP), WhatsApp groups, etc.
Recently, a new Central Sector Scheme, “Mission Mausam,” was launched by MoES with the goal of making Bharat a “Weather-ready and climate-smart” nation.
Bharat Forecast System (BhartFS) was launched very recently (on 26th May 2025). The validation of the accuracy of forecasts from BhartFS for real-time situations is yet to be carried out, as it needs data of a longer period.
To ensure effective dissemination of warnings to vulnerable populations, various steps have been taken. IMD’s weather information including alerts and warning to the public are provided through various platforms: