District wise daily Climatological Normal CD Rom

National Climate Centre (NCC), Office of Additional Director General of Meteorology (Research), India Meteorological Department, Pune is responsible for the climatological services like Long range forecasts, real time climate monitoring and diagnostics, publication of real time climate bulletins and special reports and development of climate data products.

In 2005, NCC has brought out a CD ROM of high resolution gridded daily rainfall data, which was well received and appreciated by the user community. More than 100 international and national institutions, including the academic institutions and universities, have procured this CDROM. Many research papers on Indian monsoon, based on this rainfall data set have been published in international journals.

NCC, IMD Pune has now come out with another useful data product, the districtwise daily climatological normal which was released by Union Minister for Science and Technology and Earth Sciences , Shri Kapil Sibal at a press conference in New Delhi today. There are mainly three uses of Climatological normals. Firstly, they form a benchmark or reference against which certain conditions like climate change, intensity of heat wave or cold wave etc can be assessed. Secondly, they are widely used for predictive purposes, as an indicator of the conditions likely to be experienced in a given location. Thirdly, climatological data are useful for planning in various sectors like agriculture, power, water resources, Environment etc.

This CD ROM contains daily normals of 7 meteorological parameters, viz rainfall (rainfall amount and number of rainy days), maximum temperature, minimum temperature, mean temperature, relative humidity, total cloud amount and wind speed. The rainfall normals have been prepared for 524 districts using 50 years of data (1941-1990). Normals of other parameters have been prepared for 441 districts using 30 years of data (1971-2000). The basic data have been quality controlled before calculating districtwise normals. This CDROM is basically designed for the use in personal computers with the Microsoft Operating System. The data are in a tabular form as simple text (ASCII). The data set can be printed for use as well as exported to data spread sheets like EXCEL.

NCC is now working on two more climatological data products, which will be released by June 2008. One is the extension of high resolution gridded rainfall data set; the new data set will now extend from 1901 to 2005. The other data product is the high resolution daily temperature data for 1969-2005, which will be very useful for climate change related studies and model validation.

These climatological data products are available from the National Climate Centre, India Meteorological Department, Pune (ncc@imdpune.gov.in).

Source: Press Inormation Bureau
Date: April 07, 2008