Syllabus 

GS 3: Indigenisation of technology and developing new technology.

Context: Recently, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) developed a new weather model the Bharat Forecast System (BFS) so as to boost forecasting capabilities that can predict weather for smaller geographic areas more accurately and in a localised manner.

Bharat Forecasting System (BFS)

• The new system places India among the global leaders in weather prediction.
• The Bharat Forecasting System (BFS) has been under testing since 2022.
• It was developed by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) in Pune, which is part of the Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES).
• The ministry has spent close to ₹90 crore on a new supercomputer to power the platform. 
• The plan is to double the size of India's weather radar network in two years to feed the model with additional data.

Improved Grid Resolution for Greater Accuracy

• The existing weather models divide the globe into grid squares of 12 km.
• The new BFS model refines this to 6-km grids, resulting in a four-fold improvement in resolution.
• India is the only country in the world which is currently offering operational weather forecasts at a 6 km × 6 km resolution.
  Global forecast models like the EU's Integrated Forecast System and the US’s Global Forecast System have a resolution between 9 km and 14 km.
  It means that BFS can zoom in on smaller regions and give localised reports for better rainfall prediction and flood preparation.
• Previously, forecasts were available at the block level up to five days in advance.
• With BFS, forecasts can now be issued at the panchayat level, covering smaller areas such as a few villages.
• This enhanced resolution allows more precise forecasting, capturing local weather variations that are often missed in block-level predictions.
• The tropical region weather changes are unpredictable in nature, and thus, higher resolution models are required to capture the spatial changes.
  Earlier, IMD used to issue one forecast for four villages. But with BFS it can issue separate forecasts for each of the four villages.

New Grid Structure for Tropical Regions

• Earlier weather models used equal-sized grids across the globe.
• The Bharat Forecast System is based on the advanced ‘Triangular Cubic Octahedral Grid model’, which enables real-time modelling.
• The Triangular Cubic Octahedral Grid model has demonstrated a 30% improvement in forecasting extreme rainfall events and a 64% enhancement in predictions within core monsoon zones.
• This change improves the model’s relevance and accuracy for regions like India.
• The data from a network of 40 Doppler Weather Radars (a system of high-resolution weather monitoring stations) from across the country will be used to run the BFS model.
  The number of Doppler radars will gradually rise to 100, enabling the weather office to issue nowcasts—short-term weather forecasts for the next two hours—nationwide.

High-Performance Computing Infrastructure

• The improved forecasting capability is supported by high-performance computing systems:
  Supercomputer ‘Arka’ at Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune:
  11.77 Peta FLOPS of computing power
  A peta-flop is one quadrillion floating-point operations per second.
  33 Petabytes of storage
  ‘Arunika’ at the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF), Delhi:
  8.24 Peta FLOPS of computing power
  24 Petabytes of storage
• These systems significantly enhance the capacity to process high-resolution weather data in real time.