The Ministry of Earth Science (MoES)  launched the Ensemble Prediction System (EPS) for generating more accurate and area specific forecast of extreme weather events like rains, heat wave and cold wave.

Ensemble prediction system:-

• The new Ensemble Prediction System (EPS) has been touted as best available model after such a system available in Europe.
• The new EPS system has been developed by three bodies under Ministry of Earth Sciences viz. Indian Meteorological Department (IMD), National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) and Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology.
• The most salient feature of new EPS is its high resolution for short-medium range weather forecasts.
• In its calculations, the system will use a newly procured 8 petaflops high-power computing system. The system was recently procured for Rs. 450 crore.

Advantages:-

• These new systems, according to IMD, shall improve upon deterministic forecasts that are prone to high margins of error.
• Under the new system, the area of spatial resolution (currently 23 km grid scale) will come down to 12 km. This would help sending out district level warning and forecast extreme weather events as before as five days.
• The EPS will not only enable the India Meteorological Department (IMD) to give forecast five days before, but would also add the probability of occurrence of an extreme weather event with its level of intensity. The new ensemble will tell the probability of rainfall according to its intensity and volume, this will be colour coded for ease of interpretation.
• Frameworks of the new EPS are among the best weather prediction systems in the world at present and very few forecasting centres in the world use this high resolution for short-medium range probabilistic weather forecasts.
• The EPS will enhance the weather information being provided by the current models by quantifying the uncertainties in the weather forecast and generate probabilistic forecasts.
• It will greatly help the disaster management authorities and other users in making better emergency response decisions by explicitly accounting for the uncertainty in weather forecasts.
• The accurate weather forecasts would help farmers to damage crops and also support administration to take disasters prevention steps beforehand.

Disadvantages :-

• This system will not be very helpful when it comes to predicting thunderstorms, which India has seen across the country recently, as these are mesoscale weather phenomena (limited to a small geography) and not well captured even with 12km grid scale.

Conclusion:-

• Advance prediction can help farmers and agriculture which is largely impacted due to weather changes. So the ensemble prediction system is the step in the right direction.