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In a pioneering effort, the West Bengal Government is planning to roll out location-specific weather forecasting and pest and disease-related advisory for nearly 60 lakh farmers, across the State.
Earlier, the advisories had little relevance to the farmers as they were drawn from general information released by the Indian Meteorological Department.
As the first step, the West Bengal agriculture department has created a network of 147 modern weather stations that automatically disseminates real-time data directly to the collection centre, using mobile GPRS technology.
The data is fed with the State agricultural farms, district agriculture departments and the range officers (in charge of a cluster of districts).
Private weather forecasting agency, ExpressWeather, is handling the operation and maintenance of the weather stations.In the next step, the State metrological department and ExpressWeather will collate this real-time climate information with the high resolution satellite data to provide a location-specific weather forecast.
“In the view of changing weather conditions, the use of live data improves the reliability of the services by 10-12 per cent,” a State official said.
The State is now conducting a trial run in four blocks – Mohit Nagar, Falakata, Kumargram and Malbazar – in North Bengal.
“Once the model is perfected, we plan to roll out such services across the State,” he said.
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