Peter Webster, an atmospheric scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has developed a weather-prediction method that provides a 30-day prediction of the location and intensity of monsoon rains, the heavy tropical downpours that fall annually in South Asia. Such forecasts could allow farmers there to improve planning, avoiding such devastating losses as the $6 billion crop failure that occurred when the rains halted in the Ganges Valley last year.
The sinuous waterways where the Ganges River flows into the Bay of Bengal are strongly affected by the ups and downs of monsoon rains.Photograph courtesy of NASA.
Conventional weather forecasting relies on short-term modeling that rapidly loses accuracy when projecting more than a few days ahead. Webster instead combines statistical analysis of past monsoon patterns with current atmospheric readings from weather satellites. Monsoons are difficult to interpret because they wax and wane in chaotic cycles, and the associated rain systems ...
