VidBodh AcademyThe art and science of civil services preparation
Student login

Environment › Climate science

Extreme weather, monsoon and forecasting

Weather and its extremes: the monsoon and the ocean patterns that drive it, heatwaves, cyclones, cloudbursts and lightning, and the forecasts, radars and warnings that meet them. Prelims has asked about the Finance Commission's recommendations on disaster funding.

Showing 1 of 8 subjects, those that changed from 1 to 15 August 2026.Show all

Mission Mausam

Copy link to Mission Mausam

Prelims and Mains

A warning can only be as good as what the country is watching with, so India's answer has been to buy the watching first. The programme gathers radars, automatic weather stations and global artificial intelligence models into one network.

  • Mission Mausam is the Ministry of Earth Sciences programme to widen India's observing network, sharpen its models and take up weather modification research.
  • Phase one built most of the network the country now warns from.
  • A second phase runs from 2026 to 2031 through six verticals, of which weather modification research is one.
  • Its targets are set for 2030: forecasts 10 to 15 per cent more accurate, and hazard forecasts on a 5 km by 5 km grid reaching every household.
  • Those targets therefore fall inside this second phase and not the next.

50Doppler Weather Radars with the India Meteorological Department

1,008automatic weather stations

174seismological observatories, against 86 in 2014

₹2,000 croreMission Mausam phase one outlay, 2024 to 2026

Press Information Bureau releases of 5 to 13 August 2026, and the Ministry of Earth Sciences mission document

What changed

  1. 5 Aug 2026

    PIB, 5 Aug 2026: Mission Mausam and India's early-warning network (opens in a new tab)

  2. 22 Jul 2026Update

    • The Bharat Forecast System now runs operationally at a horizontal resolution of 6 km, against about 12 km for the older global model, and issues forecasts for a cluster of panchayats rather than a district.
    • The Department draws on 50 Doppler Weather Radars, with 29 C band, 45 X band and 12 S band radars to be added.
    • Supercomputing capacity has grown to 28 petaflops with the Arka and Arunika systems. Warnings travel as Common Alerting Protocol alerts through the SACHET app.

    PIB, 22 Jul 2026: PARLIAMENT QUESTION: BHARAT FORECAST SYSTEM (opens in a new tab) · PIB, 22 Jul 2026: PARLIAMENT QUESTION: IMPLEMENTATION OF MISSION MAUSAM (opens in a new tab) · PIB, 23 Jul 2026: PARLIAMENT QUESTION: IMPLEMENTATION OF MISSION MAUSAM (opens in a new tab)

See also: Doppler Weather Radar

Also filed elsewhere

  • Forest fires · on Forests, grasslands and mountain ecosystems

    The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Science and Technology, Environment, Forests and Climate Change, in its 412th report, found no study linking climate change to rising Himalayan forest fires, and what the range does have is two fire seasons with different causes.

  • Heat Action Plans · on India's climate policy: NDCs, net zero and adaptation

    Extreme heat is met city by city rather than nationally, which is at once the strength of the instrument and its limit.