The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Roorkee now hosts an agro-met field unit set up under the Gramin Krishi Mausam Sewa Project (GKMS), one of 130 such units in the country.

This is part of a flagship scheme of NITI-Aayog and works closely with the India Met Department (IMD), responsible for agromet advisory services, providing tailor-made management information to farmers in a real-time format.

New website launched

A new website www.gkms.iitr.ac.in was launched on Wednesday to provide online real-time weather information to stakeholders, including farmers, said Ajay K Chaturvedi, Director, IIT-Roorkee.

The website will feature links from relevant Agro-Met Field Units and institutions as well as IMD, Pune, to provide more comprehensive information about weather conditions in and around Roorkee.

The unit at IIT provides information to farmers of Dehradun, Haridwar and Pauri Garhwal districts. The IMD has identified IIT-Kharagpur also as part of the project.

The unit will record daily surface agromet data such as daily rainfall, evaporation, sunshine hours, relative humidity, wind velocity and direction, air and soil temperature, dry and wet bulb temperature, dew quantity, and grass minimum temperature. This data is transmitted to IMD, Pune, online, Chaturvedi added.

Block-level information

Currently, the Met Centre at Dehradun provides medium-range weather forecasts for five days every Tuesday and Friday. Based on this, the IIT-Roorkee unit provides Agro Advisory Services to farmers on these days.

A total of 130 field units provide district-level Agromet advisory bulletins to all 640 districts of the country. Of these, 50 are assigned to provide further block-level information.

IIT Roorkee is one of these 50 block-level units. The Experimental Agro-meteorological Advisory Services were initiated at IIT-Roorkee on May 31, 2005.

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