Guwahati: Lightning activities have shown an increasing trend in India, especially in the Northeast, in the past two decades, the State Union Minister (Independent Load) for the science of Earth, Jitendra Singh, said on Friday at Lok Sabha.
According to government data, Assam is the most vulnerable country of lightning in India for reporting 46 deaths from lightning between April 2020 and March 2021.
Assam is the only country in the northeast among the 16 states that have reported death, data is revealed.
Bihar is at the top of the list for reporting 401 lightning deaths in the period followed by Uttar Pradesh with 238 lightning deaths.
The Minister told Lok Sabha that the cellular application called Damini was developed to monitor lightning activities in the sky.
In an answer to the question, the minister further outlines that lightning activities have shown increased trends throughout India and the purpose of this application is to monitor them and send warnings to people through GPS notifications within 20 km and a radius of 40 km.
“Detailed descriptions of instructions and precautions are provided in the application.
In accordance with the latest research, the parts of the Indian Peninsula, especially northeast and east, have registered a sharp increase in lighting.
This increase is minimal over Central India and is excessive in the whole country,” said Singh.
The Indian Tropical Meteorology Institute (IITM), Pune, an autonomous research and development institution under the Ministry of Earth Science (MoES), has formed a network of lightning locations that are strategically installed in 83 places in this country to detect and find lightning strikes with fully accuracy.
This network center processor, which is located in IITM, accepts and processes the signal received from the network and identifies the location of lightning strikes with accuracy of less than 500 m.
The output of this network is shared with the Indian Meteorology Department (IMD).
From the center forecasting the national weather, the estimates and warnings are given on a scale of meteorological sub-divisions while the meteorological center of the state publishes the same at the district level.
In addition, lightning storms and related disaster weather phenomena are borne by ‘now’ (estimates for the next three hours issued every three hours) at the location / district level by state meteorological centers.