With the aim to boost resilience of farmers to vagaries of nature, the administration will offer timely weather-based information along with crop-based advisories through Automatic Weather Stations (AWS) from the next fiscal year.
The AWS network and Agromet Advisory Services (AAS) under the National Initiative on Climate Resilient Agriculture (NICRA) is hoping to strengthen the Indian agriculture resilience to climate change and climate vulnerability via strategic research and technology.
CRIDA is a national research institute which is under the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR).
These services will offer the farmers location specific weather prediction and meteorological advisory according to the different climatic conditions and cropping patterns on real time basis.
The government is establishing AWS at 100-identified Krishi Vigyan Kendras (KVKs) across India, consisting of locations such as Kargil and Poonch in Jammu and Kashmir. The work on 91 KVKs has been completed and the service will kick off from the 2012-13 financial year.
These stations will be measuring parameters like temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, rainfall, radiation and rate of evaporation, which will be collected and stored at a server located at CRIDA in Hyderabad with the help of GPRS technology.
