Republic
Day 2014
By
all measures, 2013-14 has been the most challenging, eventful and productive
years for various endeavors of the Earth System Science Organization (ESSO) in
the recent past. One of the important milestones accomplished during year is commencement
of full-fledged operations at the 3rd Antarctic Station “ Bharati”.
India has been accorded observed status in the Arctic Council in recognition of
India’s scientific contribution and endeavour in Polar research. During the
year, the country witnessed a number of natural disasters such as tropical
cyclones Thane, Phailin, and Helen and extreme events like landslides in
Uttarakhand and floods in Andhra, Gujarat due to intense precipitations, and
earthquakes besides strongest southwest monsoon of the recent years. It was a
daunting task to issue timely and reliable information on rainfall, winds,
storm surges, high waves which have been successfully performed. This has
received an overwhelming appreciation from a wide range user community. The improvement
in forecasting of various events has been accomplished primarily due to
coordinated effort of all the entities of ESSO and strengthening of
observations networks of ocean and atmospheric sectors, assimilation of data,
implementation of high resolution global and regional ocean atmospheric
models. The high performance computing system has been upgraded from the
existing 70 Teraflop to storage archival capacity of one Petabyte, which is
ranked at 36th position in the world’s top 500 and first in the country. The
Agro-Meterelogical advisories have been extended to all the 600 districts of
the country and sub-district services are being done on pilot scale in selected
districts. Currently, over 4.2 million farmers have subscribed to the agro-advisory
services. For the first time in India, an indigenous climate model has been
employed for studying variability and predictability of monsoon on seasonal,
interannual and decadal time scale. The long range forecast for the season
(June-September) rainfall for the country as a whole was 104-108% against
actual rainfall of 106% of LPA for the year 2013.
With
regard to ocean mineral survey and exploration, the work was productive. A
series of seven major research cruises of 30 days each have been conducted in
the central Indian Ocean Basin for acquisition of marine geophysical data,
where the newly developed deep-see mining technologies were tested and made
operational on experimental basis. These include testing of ROSUB at the mining
site for exploitation of hydrothermal sulfides, which transmitted real-time
data from the Indian Ridge in the Indian Ocean to oversee monitoring the
operations from Chennai. India’s filed the
application for allotment of a site for exploration of Polymetallic Sulphides
in the Indian Ocean during meeting of the International Seabed Authority,
Kingston, Jamaica, held from 8-19 July 2013. Towards providing improved
earthquake information, a set of 75 Broadband seismic
and GPS receivers have been established. The state of the art
Indian tsunami early warning system is now capable of issue advisories on
tsunamis occurred not only due to earthquakes anywhere in the Indian Ocean but
also landslides as demonstrated during the recent Pakistan earthquake. As per
India’s commitment to the UNESCO, the International Training Centre of
Operational Oceanography was established and made operational for promotion of
capacity building and training activities for the countries of the Indian Ocean
Region. Under the outreach programs, the ESSO had organized Earth Science
Olympaid in September 2013. The economic benefits of various services being
rendered by ESSO across the sectors are well recognized, which contributes
sustainably to the GDP. Lastly, the ESSO’s participation of various activities
emerged from the Result Framework Document effort. Viz., preparation of Action
Plans for ISO 9001:2008, and effort should be made for improve Innovations and
Citizen’s charters have been rated as one of the best. The evaluation of
performance of the RFD of ESSO has secured 94% consistently for the 3rd
year.
(PIB Feature).
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*Inputs from the Ministry of Earth Sciences.
SS-148/SF-148/21-01-2014
RTS/HSN