Happy Independence Day to All
The past few years have seen a lot of weather bloggers come into the limelight due to their efforts in trying to be the bridge between Official Weather Forecasts and Common Public. Weather being a complex subject it is not always possible to see converging forecasts between amateur weather enthusiasts and official weather agencies in a tropical country like India. While there may be many who might feel weather bloggers are undermining the efforts of the official weather agencies, particularly from the disaster management perspective, one cannot dispute the efforts weather bloggers are putting in creating a weather wise community.
If not for weather bloggers common public looking at radar images & satellite images would have not been as popular as what it is today. While terms like Red Thakkalis used by Pradeep John aka Tamilnadu Weatherman may have offended the purists they have certainly gone a long way in communicating about the intensity of thunderstorms. Similarly over the past few years since a lot of weather bloggers started to appear mainstream terms like MJO / El Nino etc have started becoming more popular even among common public.
Along with these terms becoming more common we have also seen some of these terms also getting tagged to disasters like floods etc unnecessarily due to the lack of understanding. For e.g. many people now associate El Nino with flooding after the 2015 Chennai floods though 2021 which was a La Nina year saw floods hit large parts of South India on a larger scale. Nevertheless we genuinely hope in the days to come the weather blogging community continues to provide clear and simple weather inferences that will benefit the larger public without falling prey to TRPs / views etc.
On this day of Indian Independence we feel proud as part of the weather blogging community of India in our efforts to create a weather wise India slowly. We at COMK also affirm our pledge to play what ever small role we could in supporting the government in its efforts to minimize damages through natural disasters. With extreme weather events here to stay the journey has just begun and there are many miles to walk in creating a “Weather wise and climate resilient India”
Making efforts to create a weather wise and climate reslient India will be the true tribute weather bloggers can play on the day of Azadi ki Amrit Mahotsav.