India joins select global club with the unique satellite

Sriharikota, Oct 12, DHNS:
Partnering with France, India on Wednesday joined the elite global club of information and knowledge providers in a key area of atmospheric and climate studies with the successful launch of ‘Megha-Tropiques (MT)’, by PSLV-C18 from Isro’s spaceport here.
The seemingly low profile joint satellite mission has been in the making for over ten years now. It was taken up because the tropical regions, which comprise half the world’s land area, required a “great deal of attention” amid rising climate change concerns, eminent scientist Roddam Narasimha told  reporters after the launch.
Initiating this project on the Indian side along with former Isro chief  Dr K  Kasturirangan, an exclusive satellite to generate data to improve predictions of weather conditions in the tropical regions had become a major imperative, Narasimha said, explaining MT’s significance.
While the ‘cloud convective systems’ played a major role in Monsoons and climate change, in the tropical regions understanding of these phenomena was still lower than it was in the higher latitudes, said Narasimha. Hence, MT was conceived with the objective of understanding the ‘convective systems’ in the tropical regions to better our predictions.
Unlike conventional remote-sensing satellites, the four payloads in the MT have been built to provide “very specific data”, which will cover the entire convective cycle, besides simultaneously giving data on rainfall, temperature and humidity profiles “on a real time basis on the tropical regions for the first time,” Narasimha said. Hence, it was as unique if not more than the US-Japan’s ‘Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission’.
‘Megha-Tropiques’ was only the “second satellite of its kind in the world,” with the data from the satellite receivable in many centers of the world, said Narasimha. These data could be put into atmospheric science models to better predictions. Thus ‘MT will be a big advance,” he added. India and France, through this partnership, will thus be contributing knowledge and information to the “Global Precipitation Measurement Mission” and enable the global community engage in understanding climate change, said Isro Chairman, K Radhakrishnan.
Stating that the MT satellite will “retrieve” all scientific parameters and data that go into the understanding of atmospheric science, he said a ‘Joint Scientific Group’ had been set up long back to design the algorithms and software required for “deciphering the data received from MT’.
Already,  21 ‘Scientific Teams’ from different countries were in place, who will be using these scientific data, Radhakrishnan said, adding, MT could cover the globe four to six times a day.