Indian Meteorological Department to Begin Issuing Predictions On Malaria Outbreaks From Next Monsoon

The Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) is set to begin issuing forecasts for malaria outbreaks from the next monsoon season onwards, reports Economic Times.

This comes as the IMD had first studied the malaria data it had received from Nagpur and explored the occurrence of the disease and its relationship with rainfall and temperature. It has now built the capability to give predictions on large scale malaria outbreaks, which can also be applied to other monsoon-related diseases like dengue and cholera.

Making the announcement, M Rajeevan who is the Secretary at the Ministry of Earth Sciences also shared that the nation has so far spent nearly Rs 990 crore on the National Monsoon Mission and high-performance computing (HPC) capabilities which have yielded dividend 50 times the investment.

Rajeevan also emphasised that the nation is planning to further ramp up its HPC facility from the existing capacity of 10 petaflops to 40 petaflops. This would significantly improve weather predictions.

It should be noted that presently, India is only next to the United States (US), the United Kingdom (UK) and Japan in the HPC capabilities.