Mumbai: Flood estimates and warning systems for the city, launched by the state government last year, have not fully operated and does not give a warning about heavy rain Saturday night, BMC official said.
In addition, the installation of four other Doppler weather radars – two in the city, and each in Thane and Navi Mumbai – to get more accurate weather forecasts is also delayed, even though this should be ready at 2020 monsoons.
The integrated flood warning system for Mumbai (iflows-mumbai) is one of the two urban flood warning systems in the country – others are in Chennai – developed by the Ministry of Earth Sciences (Moes) through collaboration with the top research institutions.
Moes initiated the development of iFlows-Mumbai in July 2019 using the expertise in-house in close coordination with BMC, and was officially launched by the main minister Uddhav Thackeray and Union Minister Harsh Vardhan on June 12 last year.
This system should provide early warning for flooding during the high rainfall events and cyclones, using detailed topographic data to produce very local inundation images in the early two days before the event.
There was no warning of extreme rain events for Saturday night from IMD, said a civil official who talked about the condition of anonymity.
This is probably because there are no typical monsoon systems such as low pressure areas in Bengal Bay or Monsun, making events difficult to predict, experts say.
Heavy rain was caused by convective clouds, said an official.
Request to Dr.
Jayanta Sarkar, scientists and heads, IMD (Mumbai), were missed.
“For a storm like that, we need radar,” said Akshay Deoras, an independent meteorologist.
“However, the current radar produces images at one hour interval – such as the optimal 15 minutes – and this is too late for real-time disaster management.”