NEW DELHI: When the skies over the south Indian city of Chennai darken with rain clouds, K Srikanth’s inbox starts to fill up.
The
42-year-old corporate marketing manager moonlights as a weather blogger
and is part of a growing community in India, where rainfall is a
national concern.
Self-taught bloggers such as Srikanth
cater to an increasing demand for forecasts in India, where the weather
especially affects daily life. They often go one step beyond official
forecasts by India’s meteorological department, using online weather
charts and basic instruments to give localised predictions about
individual towns and villages.
“Our generation thinks the
generic weather alert is not enough,” Srikanth said. “People are going
beyond the question ‘Will it rain?’ They want to know ‘When will it
rain?’ and ‘How long will it rain for?’”
As climate
change disrupts crop cycles and unleashes extreme weather on the Indian
subcontinent, enthusiasts such as Srikanth are amassing huge online
followings. With changing weather patterns, the science of forecasting
is becoming even more complicated, and self-styled experts compete
online to give the most accurate readings. Some become minor celebrities
during extreme weather events.
Unpredictable weather in
India can influence the stock market, cause public-health crises, change
industrial output and disrupt transport networks. The country
experiences its share of natural disasters, too; earlier this month, a
cyclone hit India’s southern states, killing at least 70 people. In
August, floods in the Indian state of Bihar led to more than 500 deaths.
“Weather
is such a hot topic in India that everyone wants to have their own
opinion,” said Saurabh Bhardwaj, a climate researcher at the Energy and
Resources Institute in New Delhi.
India’s vast
agricultural sector employs about 44 per cent of the country’s
workforce. About 65pc of India’s farmland is rain-fed, and farmers
desperately need reliable forecasting. They often take out loans to buy
seed and water scarcity or floods cause huge losses and threaten the
country’s food supply.
With so much at stake, successive
governments have invested in the country’s weather forecasting
infrastructure and tried to improve predictions. The National Monsoon
Mission, launched in 2013, brings together scientists and experts from
around the world to estimate rainfall. Multimillion-dollar
supercomputers are being installed in India’s weather laboratories to
improve forecast models.
But despite gradual
improvements, official forecasts are sweeping and inexact. Srikanth and
other bloggers receive hundreds of messages from people asking him to
predict weather patterns for specific areas. The coastal city of
Chennai, where Srikanth lives, is especially prone to rainfall and
cyclones in the fall and winter months.
“People want to
know when to schedule marriages or office parties, whether to delay
cricket matches, whether to travel on certain dates,” he said.
India’s
amateur forecasters are not formally trained in meteorology. Still,
many people rely on individual blogs or Facebook pages that have built
reputations after years of forecasting. “U r a gr8 help” reads a message
Srikanth received from one reader of his Chennai Rains blog, which he
manages with two other people. Another reader invited the Chennai Rains
team to his wedding.
Weather wonks such as Srikanth are
scattered around India. In the financial hub of Mumbai, 64-year-old
retired businessman Rajesh Kapadia has become a local hero for the
predictions on his blog, Vagaries of the Weather. Kapadia’s passion for
meteorology started when his father gave him a wall-mounted thermometer
as a teenager. At first, people mocked his weather obsession. “They
thought I was a madman looking at clouds,” he said.
In
the northern Indian city of Rohtak, 16-year-old Navdeep Dahiya sends
local farmers WhatsApp and Facebook weather alerts while studying for
school exams. Dahiya describes 2014 as his “golden year” — it was the
year he went on a school trip to the India meteorological department.
“I saw how farmers are helped by the weather,” he said. “I saw how they use all these gadgets to predict weather.”
Dahiya
soon set up his own weather station at home; he has thermometers, an
automatic rain gauge and a digital screen. Now known as Rohtak
Weatherman, Dahiya sends out weather reports in Hindi and gets phone
calls from farmers in the region asking for predictions.
“I
don’t know how this passion was created in me,” said Dahiya, who hopes
to run a weather-related company one day. “I’m crazy about it.”
For Srikanth, the variety of voices in the weather blogging world adds to its lure.
“None
of us are trained meteorologists, and there are differences in how we
understand the scene,” he said. “That’s the fun with weather blogging.
There are IT guys, marketing guys, college students; the diversity is
the strength of the community.”