Thunderstorm Nowcasting in India: A Survey

Thunderstorm is a major threat to life. In India it is a major disaster which causes loss of life and property every year. It is a meteorological phenomenon occurs in different parts of India which includes heavy rainfall, strong wind, hailstorm, dust storm or lightning. The earlier prediction of thunderstorms is crucial for public safety and awareness. Thunderstorm prediction is essential for public safety that’s why precision and accuracy in predicting thunderstorms is very important. Thunderstorm is a phenomenon which occurs due to formation of convection cells and the lifetime of one convection cell is less than an hour so nowcasting or short term forecasting is recommended for thunderstorms in which the model predicts the initiation, development and direction of thunderstorms sub-hourly. Indian Meteorological department uses satellites that are INSAT-3DR (74°E), INSAT-3D (84°E) & Kalpana-1 (72.4°E) operationally for forecasting. Approximately 200 Agro-Automated Weather Station (Agro- AWS), 806 Automatic weather stations, 1382 Automatic Rain gauges, 83 lightning sensors along with 63 Pilot balloon upper air observation stations serve as the backbone of weather observation services of IMD throughout the country. In addition IMD has 39 Doppler Weather Radars (DWRs) well distributed across the country to monitor severe weather events. Due to advancement in technology, the thunderstorm nowcasting techniques also evolved. Now a days , radar based techniques like TITAN (Thunderstorm Identification, Tracking and Nowcasting), satellite based techniques, Numerical weather prediction, machine learning and deep learning techniques play a vital role in nowcasting. The study also discuss about the challenges faced by meteorologists during thunderstorm nowcasting.