New Delhi, Jun 1 (PTI) The Ministry of Earth Science (MoES) today launched the Ensemble Prediction System (EPS) for generating more accurate and area specific forecast of extreme weather events like rains, heat wave and cold wave.

The EPS will not only enable the India Meteorological Department (IMD) to give forecast five days before, but would also add the probability of occurrence of an extreme weather event with its level of intensity.

Under the new model, the area of spatial resolution, which is 23 km grid scale, will reduce to 12 km, that will enable the meteorological department to give district-level warning, said Mritunjay Mohapatra, Additional Director General of IMD.

Last month, the IMD had come under attack for going over-board in issuing an alert of thunderstorm in Delhi, which did not take place.

The new EPS system has been developed by the IMD, National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) and the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology--all three are under the MoES.

The frameworks of the new EPS are among the best weather prediction systems in the world at present and very few forecasting centres in the world use this high resolution for short-medium range probabilistic weather forecasts, said M Rajeevan, Secretary, MoES.

"The EPS will enhance the weather information being provided by the current models by quantifying the uncertainties in the weather forecast and generate probabilistic forecasts.

"The probabilistic forecasts of severe weather events at 12 km grid scale across India will greatly help the disaster management authorities and other users in making better emergency response decisions by explicitly accounting for the uncertainty in weather forecasts," Rajeevan said.

He credited the introduction of the recently introduced system to a new supercomputer of 8.0 petaflops procured at the cost of Rs 450 crore.

He added that the MoES is also working to implement more effective mechanism for dissemination of weather and climate forecasts to different stake holders using different communication channels.

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