Climate and Weather Forewarning Systems for Disaster Preparedness and Response

India experiences several types of natural disasters including cyclones, floods, droughts, earthquake, landslides, heat wave, cold wave, thunder squalls and tornadoes. Most of these natural disasters (about 80%) are hydro-meteorological in nature. The risk management of these natural disasters may include several steps based on its severity and importance: (1) hazard analysis, (2) vulnerability analysis, (3) preparedness and planning, (4) early warning, (5) prevention and mitigation. The early warning component includes: (1) skill in monitoring and prediction of natural hazards, (2) effective warning products generation and dissemination, (3) coordination with emergency response units and (4) public awareness and perception about the credibility of the official predictions and warnings. Though there have been significant improvement in multi-hazard monitoring and warning system in recent years due to various initiatives of Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES)/India Meteorological Department (IMD) and policy frame work of government of India, there is still scope for improvement at state and district level in terms of (1) improving the mesoscale hazard detection and monitoring, (2) improving the spatial and temporal scale of forecasts through technological up gradation, (3) sectoral applications of early warning, (4) warning communication to last mile and disaster managers through state of art technology, (5) developing synergized standard operation procedure among the early warning agencies and user agencies and (6) upgrading and enhancing the link between early warning service provider and disaster managers. Further to stress the importance of the above, World Conference on Disaster Risk reduction (WCDRR) during 2015 at Sendai has set a target to substantially increase the availability and access to multi-hazard early warning systems and disaster risk information and assessments to the people by 2030. All these aspects have been discussed in this chapter with special emphasis on extreme weather characteristics (spatial and temporal distribution and intensity etc.), damage potential, modeling and prediction, prediction skills, information dissemination mechanisms, socio-economic impacts, achievements in recent years, existing gap areas and future scope in view of Sendai framework to achieve the target for India by 2030.