India’s new monsoon model, called the Monsoon Mission Coupled Forecast Model (CFS) was in news due to its failure to forecast the excess rainfall received during August-September 2019. It was deployed by the IMD (India Meteorological Department) under National Monsoon Mission (NMM).

Coupled Forecast Model (CFS)

• It is a dynamical model which is also called Climate Forecast Model (CFS). It has been developed based on a climate model developed by National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), U.S. and it has been implemented on Prithvi High Performance Computers (HPC) at Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune.
• The Dynamical models employ a different approach to forecasting monsoon i.e. they roughly relies on capturing the interactions between land, ocean and atmosphere and tracking how the changes in each affect other.
• The land, atmosphere and ocean state at a particulate time (generally March) is mathematically simulated on supercomputers and extrapolated into monsoon months.

National Monsoon Mission (NMM): It was has launched by Union Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES). The Ministry has bestowed the responsibility of execution and coordination of this mission to Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune.

The Objective of the mission it to build an ocean atmospheric model for –

• Improved prediction of monsoon rainfall on extended range to seasonal time scale of up to 16 days to about one season
• Improved prediction of rainfall, temperature as well as extreme weather events on short to medium range time scale up to 15 days