Farmers in the country may have a lot to cheer for with the latest initiative by Kapil Sibal, union ministry of science and technology, and earth sciences, making an attempt to protect them from the vagaries of weather with the inauguration of a new agro-meteorological advisory service, which promises to offer more precise advice to farmers.

Until now, the agro-met advisory service was operating at the level of 127 agro-climatic zones. Now, it will operate at a smaller scale by providing district-wise advisories. This changeover is significant considering that even within the individual zones, there are considerable variations in the weather conditions as well as differences in terms of cropping system, farm operations and soil conditions.

Sibal said that while the headquarters of the India Meteorological Department (IMD) at New Delhi would generate the necessary weather forecast up to five days using the weather models of Indian and foreign agencies, the agro met field units located in state agriculture universities, institutes of the Indian Council of Agriculture Research and other such centres would prepare the advisories.

The advisories would be disseminated to the farmers through various media, including private television channels, FM radios and NGOs at the grassroots level, apart from All India Radio, Doordarshan, newspapers, district agriculture offices and the web sites of IMD and universities.

IMD had been operating agromet advisory service (AAS) on the basis of short range weather forecast at the state level, since 1976. Considering the need of farming community to provide a service with improved resolution based on medium range weather forecast, an improved service was developed and rendered by National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF).

Although quite successful and useful in terms of benefits accrued, the present agro-advisory system is not adequate to deal with crop management issues owing to weather variability prevalent at sub-district levels. Further, the problem of spatial variability in weather gets compounded due to variable cropping system, farm operations and soil conditions at the sub-agro climatic zone level. Hence, the upgradation from AAS to DAAS, or District-Level Agro-Meteorological Advisory Service.

Salient features of DAAS

1.  Weather observing system: Setting up 550 additional automatic weather stations (AWS) and 1350 automatic rain gauge (ARG) stations in the first phase of its modernization plan to add to the existing 125 AWS. With this, every district in the country will have at least one AWS and 2 ARG stations. In addition to this, a network of 55 Doppler Weather Radar has been planned of which 12 are to be commissioned in the first phase. Techniques have been developed to assimilate large volume of satellite derived information, including the INSAT-3D to be launched next year.
2.  Weather forecasting system: Already started issuing quantitative district level weather forecast up to five days from 1 June, 2008. The products comprise of quantitative forecasts for seven weather parameters viz., rainfall, maximum and minimum temperatures, wind speed and direction, relative humidity and cloudiness. IMD will generate these products based on a Multi Model Ensemble technique using forecast products available from a number of models of India and other countries like the UK, US and Japan.
3. Advisory service network: Based on the above forecast products and the crop information available from districts, the Agromet field units (AMFU) will prepare district-wise agro-advisories.
4. Advisory dissemination mechanism: These weather based advisories would be disseminated to the farmers through mass media dissemination, Internet etc as well as through district level intermediaries. The advisories would be communicated through multi-channel dissemination system including All India Radio (AIR), Doordarshan, private television channels, FM radios, print media (newspapers), Internet (web pages of IMD, universities, etc) and community Service Centres of Ministry of Information Technology, cell phone-SMS, district agricultural offices (DAO), kisan call