Decision support system for digitally climate informed services to farmers in India

Abstract

India Meteorological Department (IMD), Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES) in collaboration with Indian Council of Agriculture Research (ICAR), State Agriculture Universities (SAUs) , Indian Institute of Technology (IITs) and other organizations is rendering weather forecast based District level Agrometeorological Advisory Service (AAS) for benefits of farmers in the country under the centrally sponsored scheme ‘Atmosphere & Climate Research-Modelling Observing Systems & Services (ACROSS) ’ of MOES. AAS, popularly known as Gramin Krishi Mausam Sewa (GKMS) provides advance weather information along, with crop specific agromet advisories to the farming community by using state of the art instruments and technology through efficient delivering mechanism of the information which ultimately enables farmers to take appropriate actions at farm level. The various components of GKMS viz. observing weather, its monitoring and forecast; crop specific advisory bulletin generation and dissemination; outreach and feedback have been/are being digitized to support integrating all the components of information generation and action suggested linked to these information. An Information and Communication Technology (ICT) based Agromet Decision Support System is developed for automation of the services provided under GKMS. This includes a dynamic framework to link the information of weather forecast, real time weather observation, crop-weather calendar etc. to translate weather forecast into actionable farm advisories for efficient farm level decision making in India. Apart from this, effort is being made to develop recent technology driven tools to estimate future yield of crops and prepare an irrigation schedule without a need of multiple parameters.

Keywords

• GKMS
• Weather Forecast
• Agromet DSS
• ICT
• Advisory feedback