Monsoon Mission

Objectives

The monsoon mission is planned with an overall objective to improve monsoon prediction over India on all time scales. Specific objectives of the monsoon mission are:

  • To build a working partnership between the academic and R&D Organisations both national and international, and the MoES to improve the operational monsoon forecast skill over the country. 
  • To setup a state of the art dynamical modelling frame work for improving prediction skill of ‘Seasonal and Extended range predictions’ and ‘Short and Medium range (up to two weeks) predictions’. 

At IITM, the principle focus of the Monsoon Mission is to develop Seasonal and Extended range prediction systems with the following objectives:

  • To develop a fully coupled ocean-atmosphere-land modelling system for dynamical Prediction on Extended range and seasonal time scales and to improve the prediction skill.
  • Development of Data assimilation system for Climate Forecast System (CFS)
  • To improve parameterisation schemes in the coupled ocean-atmosphere models.
  • To study and understand the monsoon variability over different spatio-temporal scales.
  • To coordinate the working partnership amongst the ESSO-MoES organisations and various national and international R&D and academic institutions.

First phase of monsoon mission completed successfully in 2017 and handed over the seasonal and extended range prediction system developed to India meteorological Department (IMD) for operational use.

Second phase of monsoon mission started by October 2017. The second phase focuses on both model development and application development for agriculture, hydrology, energy etc sectors.