Air quality early warning for 92 more polluted cities in 2 yrs
New Delhi: The India Meteorological Department (IMD) is planning to provide air quality early warning through the System of Air Quality Weather Forecasting and Research (SAFAR) to 92 more polluted cities in the next two years. SAFAR, developed by Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorological (IITM) Pune and was operationalized by IMD in 2010 during Commonwealth Games, is India’s first metro air quality service. It currently issues 1-3 days advance forecast in 40 cities including Delhi, Pune, Mumbai and Ahmedabad of a total of 132 ‘air contaminated’ cities.
“Air quality monitoring and forecasting services by SAFAR under IMD is planning to extend its coverage to 92 more cities out of 132 air contaminated cities in the next two years," said a government official aware of the development. “Forecast can be given to all 132 contaminated cities with the inclusion of high computational power." “At present, for forecast, we use the American prediction model whether it is for meteorology or pollution. The ministry of earth sciences is going to purchase some high computational servers.
If we get that, it will be easy because extending forecast in new cities takes time. When we give forecast, we cannot rely on one model. We should see at least a couple of models.
Otherwise, wrong signals from a model can lead to a wrong forecast," the official said. IMD so far has a total of 1,200 monitoring stations, including 400 real-time stations across 400-500 cities since the time the air pollution prevention Act was introduced in 1986. In Delhi alone, it has 40 real time monitoring stations and 6-7 manual stations.
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