Agromet Field Unit upgraded and installed in IIT Roorkee

2024-04-19 12:06:43 Education

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May 2019, Roorkee- An Agro-Met Field Unit (AMFU) has been installed at Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee under Gramin Krishi Mausam Sewa Project which is part of 130 such units in the country. The Agromet Advisory Services (AAS) has been initiated by Indian Meteorological Department, Ministry of Earth Sciences, Govt. of India, New Delhi.

The mission of the AAS is to provide tailor-made management information to the farmers in real-time format. This is part of the flagship scheme of Niti Ayog which is named as ?Gramin Krishi Mausam Sewa (GKMS)?

A new website (www.gkms.iitr.ac.in) has been developed which is launched on May 01, 2019. This new website will also provide online real-time weather information to the stakeholders including farmers. The developed website will include links from relevant AMFUs and institutions as well as IMD Pune to provide more comprehensive information about the weather conditions in and around Roorkee.

IIT Roorkee AMFU is providing information to the farmers of three districts which are Dehradun, Haridwar and Pauri Garhwal. The IMD, Ministry of Earth Sciences, Govt. of India has identified two IIT?s namely IIT Roorkee and IIT Kharagpur for this purpose. These AMFUs provide district level Agromet Advisory Bulletins (AABs) for all the 640 districts of the country.

Out of these 130 AMFUs, 50 AFMUs are further assigned to provide block level information. IIT Roorkee is one of these 50 block level units. The Experimental Agrometeorological Advisory Services (EAAS) was initiated at IIT Roorkee on 31st May, 2005.

Expressing his happiness on this weather advisory project, Prof Ajit K Chaturvedi, Director, IIT Roorkee said ?Agromet Advisory Services is a very useful program of IMD and we are delighted that IIT Roorkee is a part of it. It gives us an opportunity to serve the farmers in our region and also allows us to use the data obtained for research.?

The activities of this center are daily surface Agrometeorological Data Observation in which they observethe daily rainfall, evaporation, sunshine hours, relative humidity, wind velocity and direction, air and soil temperature, dry and wet bulb temperature, dew quantity, and grass minimum temperature etc. and transmits this data to IMD, Pune online.

The medium range weather forecast for 5 days is received by AMFU Roorkee from Met Centre, Dehradun on every Tuesday and Friday. Agro Advisory Services are provided to the farmers on the basis of this forecast on every Tuesday and Friday.

Recently, the Agromet observatory has been upgraded with the installation of advance equipment at IIT Roorkee. The data received from AWS are being sent at 15 minute interval to IMD Pune through GPRS which is based on Global System for Mobile (GSM) service.

About IIT Roorkee

IIT Roorkee is an Institute of national importance imparting higher education in engineering, sciences, management, architecture and planning, and humanities and social sciences. Since its establishment in 1847, the Institute has played a vital role in providing technical manpower and know-how to the country. In the Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2019, the Institute has been ranked 3rd among the IITs. IIT Roorkee is an institution with pioneering contribution in the field of education, training, research and development, advisory services in various fields including hydrology, water resources, geology, earthquake, renewable energy and environmental management advisory and has world class laboratories related to hydropower and water sector.