Mission Mausam: India's Weather Forecasting Mission, Radars and Colour-Coded Warnings

Mission Mausam: Approval, Launch, Outlay and Aims

Cabinet Approval, Outlay and Implementing Institutes

The Union Cabinet approved the mission on 11 September 2024 with an outlay of ₹2,000 crore over two years, and the Prime Minister launched it on 14 January 2025. Its goal is to make India a weather-ready and climate-smart nation, by greatly expanding how the country observes, understands, models and forecasts weather and climate.

• Ministry: The Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES) implements it.
• Lead institutes: The India Meteorological Department (IMD), the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune, and the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF), Noida.
• Supporting institutes: The Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services (INCOIS), the National Centre for Polar and Ocean Research and the National Institute of Ocean Technology, with academia and industry.
• Mission period: The first phase was set for 2024‑26; the government told Parliament in March 2026 that the mission runs in phases until 2031.

As approved by the Cabinet, the mission covers monsoon forecasts, alerts for air quality, extreme weather and cyclones, weather interventions for managing fog, hail and rain, and capacity building and awareness. Its critical elements are next-generation radars and satellite systems, high-performance supercomputers, improved Earth system models and a GIS-based automated Decision Support System for real-time dissemination.

Targets and Progress: Radars, Profilers, Testbeds and Weather Management

The mission set out its observation targets in September 2024: 50 Doppler Weather Radars, 60 radiosonde and radiowind stations, 100 disdrometers, 10 wind profilers, 25 radiometers, an urban testbed, a process testbed, an ocean research station and 10 marine automatic weather stations with upper-air observation.

By July 2026 IMD was receiving data from 50 Doppler radars run by IMD, other MoES institutes and ISRO, and the network was being expanded with 29 C‑band, 45 X‑band and 12 S‑band radars, 19 wind profilers, 25 microwave radiometers and 60 new GPS radiosonde stations. In January 2026, with 47 radars working, 87 per cent of the country's area was under radar coverage.

• Mahabaleshwar radar: On 24 April 2026 IITM opened an X‑band dual-polarisation Doppler radar at about 1,400 m in the Western Ghats, giving nowcasts up to three hours ahead over Satara, Pune and parts of Konkan.
• Atmospheric Research Testbed: An observatory at Silkheda in Sehore district, Madhya Pradesh, in the monsoon core zone, studies monsoon convection, cloud microphysics and rainfall variability.
• Weather management: The mission develops technologies and protocols to manage fog, hail and rain. Cloud seeding, one such method, disperses substances such as silver iodide into the air to serve as nuclei for cloud droplets or ice, to change the amount or type of precipitation.

Weather Forecasting in India: Timescales, Models and Radars

Types of Weather Forecasting and Numerical Weather Prediction

Weather forecasts are grouped by how far ahead they look, and the mission works on every range.

• Nowcast: The present weather and a forecast for the next few hours, issued district by district on a map and renewed about every three hours.
• Short and medium range: Forecasts for the coming days; IMD issues district warnings five days ahead.
• Extended range and seasonal: Outlooks further ahead, up to the whole monsoon season.

Modern forecasts come from numerical weather prediction, which uses mathematical models of the atmosphere and oceans to predict the weather from current conditions. Observations are first fed into the model through data assimilation, and the calculations need some of the world's most powerful supercomputers. IMD's global forecast system and NCMRWF's Mithuna system run at a 12 km grid.

The Bharat Forecast System (BharatFS), developed by IITM Pune and dedicated on 26 May 2025, runs at 6 km on a Triangular Cubic Octahedral grid, finer than the 9 to 14 km of typical global models. It was built to give forecasts for a cluster of panchayats and to predict extremes better, and in research mode it forecast extreme rainfall about 30 per cent more accurately than the previous model.

The Arka supercomputer at IITM and Arunika at NCMRWF have raised the ministry's computing power, cutting the BharatFS runtime from about 12 hours to 3 to 6 hours so that it can run in real time, and the mission fuses physics-based models with artificial intelligence and machine learning. The accuracy of severe-weather forecasts has improved by 40 per cent over the previous decade.

Doppler Weather Radars and the Observation Network

A Doppler weather radar locates precipitation, calculates its motion and estimates its type, whether rain, snow or hail. Most modern weather radars are pulse-Doppler radars, which detect the motion of rain droplets as well as how intense the rain is, so they show the structure of a storm as it develops.

• Dual polarisation: Shows cloud microphysics, such as drop size and the structure of a storm, and sharpens estimates of how much rain is falling.
• Blind spots in mountains: A radar works by sending out and receiving beams, and mountains block them, so the rugged areas most prone to cloudbursts are often poorly covered.
• Non-weather targets: Insects carried by the wind and migrating birds also return echoes, which is why radar is used to study bird migration.

Radars are one part of a wider network. Between the end of 2014 and the end of 2025, automatic weather stations grew from 675 to 1,008, rain gauge stations from 3,500 to 6,726 and runway visual range systems at airports from 20 to 186, while a lightning location network was built at 104 places. Satellites add the view from above.

Impact-Based Forecasting and IMD's Colour-Coded Warnings

IMD Colour Codes: Green, Yellow, Orange and Red Warnings

Since 2020 IMD has issued impact-based forecasts and risk-based warnings at the district level, using colour codes. An impact-based forecast tells people not only what the weather will be but what harm it may do, so that district authorities can act before it arrives.

The colour is not set by the amount of rain alone. Forecasters weigh the probability of the event together with its likely impact, and a district already in flood can be given orange or red for rain that would be yellow elsewhere. IMD's own Decision Support System, built in India and in use since 2023, issues these warnings on a GIS platform; by April 2026 its impact-based warnings reached nearly 80 per cent of the population, and the system had halved the time needed to prepare a forecast and made its forecasts about 30 per cent more accurate.

Reaching People: SACHET Alerts, Mausamgram and Weather Apps

A warning saves lives only if it reaches people in time. IMD generates alerts in the Common Alerting Protocol, and state disaster management authorities send them by SMS to people in the affected area through SACHET, the platform of the National Disaster Management Authority; Google and Apple also carry the feeds.

• Scale: By January 2026, 9,342 crore SMS alerts had been sent since August 2021, 77.64 crore of them during cyclone Montha.
• Mausamgram: Village-level forecasts by PIN code or gram panchayat, hourly for 36 hours, three-hourly for five days and six-hourly for 10 days.
• Other channels: The MAUSAM, MEGHDOOT and DAMINI mobile apps, television, radio and social media, with sector-specific advisories for farmers and disaster managers.

The results show in the death toll. About 7,000 people died in the 1999 Odisha super cyclone; in recent years the death toll from tropical cyclones has fallen below 100. The government estimates that an accurate forecast of one cyclone saves about ₹1,100 crore in ex gratia, evacuation and losses to sectors such as power, shipping, aviation and railways.

Cloudbursts and the Limits of Weather Forecasting

Cloudburst Meaning, Formation and Why It Is Hard to Forecast

IMD defines a cloudburst as 10 cm or more of rain in an hour over a small area of about 20 to 30 sq km. Because so much water falls so fast, the ground cannot absorb it and sudden floods follow; some scientists also use the term "mini-cloudburst" for 5 cm in an hour.

• Formation: Warm, moist air rises fast; in mountains the monsoon winds are forced up the slopes, which is orographic lifting. The rising air cools and condenses into cumulonimbus clouds up to 15 km tall.
• The burst: Strong updrafts hold the raindrops aloft until their weight is too great or the updrafts weaken, and the water falls at once.
• Where and when: Most strike the Himalaya during the monsoon, when moist clouds from the Bay of Bengal or the Arabian Sea are driven against the mountains. Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, and Jammu and Kashmir have reported a surge of such events, especially in July and August.
• Frequency: IMD recorded only about 30 cloudbursts between 1970 and 2016, an undercount because most occur in remote, high places with few gauges; a warming atmosphere holds more moisture and is making them more frequent.

Cloudbursts are among the hardest events to forecast. A model's grid cell is larger than the area of a cloudburst, the event builds within hours, and mountains block radar beams and have few weather stations. Nowcasting and the mission's denser radar network and AI aim to narrow the gap, though a cloudburst will remain harder to predict than an ordinary storm. The label itself needs care. In the 2025 Dharali floods in Uttarakhand the rain rate was later found to be below the cloudburst threshold, and construction on riverbeds, deforestation and poor drainage did much of the damage.

Mission Mausam and Disaster Management: From Relief to Preparedness

Three Stages of Disaster Management and the NDMA

Disaster management has three stages. Before a disaster it means data on hazards, vulnerability maps, awareness, planning, preparedness and prevention; during a disaster, rescue and relief such as evacuation, shelters, food, water and medical aid; and after it, rehabilitation, recovery and capacity building for the next event.

The earlier approach, which UPSC calls reactive, concentrated on the second stage, relief after the event. The Disaster Management Act, 2005, set up the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), headed by the Prime Minister, to frame policies and guidelines and work with the state authorities, and the stress has since moved to the first stage. Forecasting is the backbone of that stage, and the need is large, since about two-thirds of India's area, and a similar share of its people, are vulnerable to disasters.

The benefits reach well beyond disasters. The Cabinet named agriculture, defence, environment, aviation, water resources, power, tourism, shipping, transport, energy and health; INCOIS's ocean advisories and potential fishing zone maps serve fishermen, and better monsoon forecasts guide crop planning and irrigation.

Mission Mausam in the UPSC Syllabus: GS Paper III and Disaster Management

Weather Services and Disaster Management in the UPSC and PCS Syllabus

Mission Mausam belongs to General Studies Paper III, under science and technology and disaster management, and to the climate topics of Paper I. State PCS papers ask about the same national missions and IMD warnings.

• Prelims facts: Ministry of Earth Sciences; Cabinet approval 11 September 2024; ₹2,000 crore over two years; launched 14 January 2025; IMD, IITM and NCMRWF; BharatFS at 6 km; four warning colours.
• Concepts: Nowcast, numerical weather prediction, data assimilation, Doppler and dual-polarisation radar, impact-based forecasting, cloud seeding, cloudburst.
• Mains analysis: The shift from relief to preparedness, early warning and the last mile, and the limits of forecasting in mountains.