IMD Launches AI Weather Tools for Farmers
AI-enabled forecasting tools show how India is applying data, models and local infrastructure to make climate services more actionable.
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The India Meteorological Department (IMD) has launched two AI-enabled weather forecasting products to provide more localized and actionable information for farmers, disaster managers and administrators.
The products, developed under the Ministry of Earth Sciences, include an AI-based system to forecast the advance of the monsoon across India and a pilot service offering high-resolution rainfall forecasts for Uttar Pradesh.
They were jointly developed by IMD, the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune and the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting.
The monsoon advance system will provide probabilistic forecasts every Wednesday up to four weeks in advance and is designed to support farmers across 16 states and more than 3,000 sub-districts through the Agriculture Ministry’s dissemination network.
The second product, the High Spatial Resolution Rainfall Forecast for Uttar Pradesh, will generate rainfall forecasts at 1-km resolution up to 10 days ahead. The pilot uses AI-driven downscaling and draws on data from automatic rain gauges, automatic weather stations, Doppler weather radars and satellite-based rainfall datasets.
Minister of State for Earth Sciences Jitendra Singh said the tools would help farmers make “more informed decisions relating to sowing, irrigation, crop protection and harvest planning with far greater local precision.”
He said the products mark a shift from conventional weather forecasts to impact-based, decision-support forecasting.
Singh said India’s weather forecasting infrastructure has expanded sharply over the past decade, with the number of Doppler weather radars rising from 16-17 to about 50.
Another 50 are planned under Mission Mausam.
He said severe weather forecast accuracy had improved by nearly 40% over the past decade, while cyclone track, intensity and landfall forecasts had improved by 30-35% over five years.
M. Ravichandran, secretary in the Ministry of Earth Sciences, said the new systems combine numerical weather prediction models with AI-based data analysis. The Uttar Pradesh pilot will be expanded to other regions as observational infrastructure grows, he said.
