New Delhi, Early warning systems need to be extended beyond rainfall events to include triggers of disasters such as the Nepal’s flash floods even a few minutes of warning can help save the lives of people downstream, says climate scientist Tapio Schneider.
We probably need to expand them beyond events triggered by rainfall to such events so that you can have at least a few minutes of warning for people downstream and save some lives that way,” Schneider told PTI in an interview. “Early warning systems are important. Schneider also leads the ‘Climate Modelling Alliance’, a coalition of scientists, engineers and applied mathematicians from Caltech, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NASA, building a new Earth system model.
He added that permafrost is melting as the climate warms and one can expect more such events “even though any individual event will have different proximate causes”. The climate scientist added that the last few years have seen a global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius and it is “inevitable” that the world will see a decade of 1.5 degrees Celsius warming.
He added, however, “More data will be helpful for our model, for all models. I think where one big opportunity now lies for places like Ashoka is that climate modelling, weather prediction and assessing climate risk has been confined to rich countries. On the issue of how rainfall is hard to predict in India, he suggested that AI models that are much cheaper to run than other large-scale ones can be developed in university groups and deployed with India Meteorological Department’s data. “The extensive monsoon rainfall record IMD has, for example.
Use those data to make AI models better,” the Caltech professor said.
