Bangalore, Dec 9 (IANS) India will soon have more home-grown Doppler radars deployed at strategic locations across the country for weather forecast and climatic conditions, a space scientist said Wednesday.
“Initially, four Doppler radars will be deployed, with the first one next year at Cherrapunji in the north-east for monitoring cloud formation, wind movement and weather forecast in the eastern region,” former Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chairman G. Madhavan Nair said here.

Similarly, three other Doppler radars will be located in the western, northern and southern regions to assist the Indian Meteorology Department (IMD) monitor weather.

“We have developed the technology and transferred it to Bharat Electronics Ltd (BEL) to manufacture the Doppler radars. The first such radar has been in extensive use at our spaceport Sriharikota for launch purposes,” Nair told reporters on the margins of a radar symposium.

A Doppler radar makes use of the change in wave frequency to generate data on objects at a distance by beaming a microwave signal towards a desired target and recording its reflection.

The weather radar has been named after Austrian physicist Christian Doppler who pioneered it in 1842.

Variations in the frequency of the signal give accurate measurements of a target’s velocity relative to the radar source and the direction of the microwave beam.

Doppler radars are also used for other civil and military applications such as air traffic control, air defense, sounding satellites, and police speed guns and radiology.

ISRO is working with the IMD to deploy the first Doppler radar at Cherrapunji in Meghalaya, as the location is the world’)s wettest place on the earth for receiving the highest rainfall in a year.

The meteorological satellite (MetSat-1) is the first dedicated geo weather spacecraft the state-run Indian space agency built in the INSAT (Indian satellite) series and launched Sep 12, 2002 on board a home-grown polar satellite launch vehicle (PSLV).

Later, the MetSat was christened Kalpana-1 Feb 5, 2003 in the memory of Indian-born NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) astronaut Kalpana Chawla after she perished during the re-entry of her space shuttle Columbia Feb 1, 2003 over the US.

The satellite features a very high resolution scanning radiometer for three-band images and a data relay transponder.

In the run up to set about 1,000 automatic weather stations (AWS) across the country for better weather forecasting, ISRO has located a Doppler radar at its upgraded National Atmospheric Research Laboratory at Gadanki near Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh in September 2005.