The Ministry of Earth Sciences has said that the Bharat Forecast System (BharatFS) now enables real-time weather prediction at 6 km horizontal resolution. The update matters because higher-resolution forecasting can capture local weather features better than earlier global models and can support district- and village-cluster-level advisories.
What changed
According to the Ministry of Earth Sciences, BharatFS uses a newly implemented Triangular Cubic Octahedral (TCo) dynamical grid. The Ministry said this grid allows the model to work at a finer scale than its predecessor, GFS T1534, which was around 12 km resolution, and finer than many global operational models that run at about 9–14 km.
The Ministry also said that the newly acquired supercomputing facilities Arka at IITM-Pune and Arunika at NCMRWF-Noida reduced runtime enough for the model to be used for real-time prediction.
Why BharatFS matters
BharatFS is designed to generate forecasts for the cluster of panchayats level. The Ministry said the finer grid helps capture local weather features, which can improve forecasts for villages, rainfall pockets, and short-duration extreme events.
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