-The Conversation/ Scroll.in Syukuro Manabe’s work goes down in history as the first robust estimate of how much the world would warm if carbon dioxide concentrations double. After the second world war, many of Japan’s smartest scientists found jobs in North American laboratories. Syukuro (Suki) Manabe, a 27-year-old physicist, was part of this brain drain. He was working on weather forecasting but left Japan in 1958 to join a new research project...

-The Hindu Agency failed to gauge the magnitude of the excess rainfall in 2019, 2020 The India Meteorological Department (IMD) may introduce new monsoon models this year to better forecast changes in rainfall. At a day-long meet, via videoconference, involving several senior meteorologists across the IMD’s offices and those from affiliated climate research institutes, discussions took place on the accuracy of the existing models, emerging weather models and their strengths and weaknesses in...

A recent report by Christian Aid -- an international NGO based out of London -- says that the world was not just hit by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, it actually faced massive loss of lives and livelihoods owing to the intensification of the ongoing climate crisis. Climate-related disasters varied from fires in Australia and the United States, floods in China, India and Japan to storms in Europe and the...

-Down to Earth Every rupee spent on weather forecasting fetches 50-fold economic gains to below poverty line farming families   A survey by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) has shown that timely delivery of weather advisories to farmers had a significant impact on their income. The survey was done to gauge the economic impact of India’s investments on the National Monsoon Mission (NMM) and High Performance Computing Facilities (HPC). It...

  Air quality in North India in general and Delhi National Capital Region (Delhi NCR) in particular plunged to its lowest point in recent years during October-November thanks to a variety of factors. Through media reports one comes to know that stubble burning (also called paddy straw burning/ crop residue burning) is chiefly responsible for the public health crisis in India's capital and its nearby regions. Data accessed from the website...