Another "weather man" from Chennai

The MET office is usually way off the mark predicting rain and sunshine, but a techie-turned weatherman has devised an ingenious way to foretell what the heavens have in store for us. His forecast comes as colourful maps on e-mail and updates on SMS. K. Rajesh, a computer techie active in Ham radio, came back to Chennai from the US and turned his weather-watching hobby into dishing out predictions for his extended circle of family and friends.

Rajesh loves working with satellites through assembled radios and other equipment.

If he is to be believed, anyone can be a weatherman with just Rs 4,000 and a computer. The cost includes a weather station, an antenna (Rs 150) and a receiver (Rs 1,500), which can be designed by anyone who knows computers. This set-up helps pull in signals from weather satellites in orbit. The five-watt radio signals received are then decoded, he explains.

Rajesh's 'station' uses the three operational polarorbiting National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOOA) weather satellites, equipped with visual and infrared equipment. About 300 km high in the sky, they orbit approximately once every one-and-a-half hour. By decoding and analysing the voluminous data gathered from signals, an accurate weather map can be produced, explains the techie, an alumnus of the Thiagarajar Engineering College in Madurai.

Though India currently has the INSAT and Kalpana Metsat weather satellites in geo-stationary orbit, the signals from them are in the gigahertz range, which require expensive equipment to catch. Further, unlike NOOA, their technical information is not in the public domain. While the MET office's cliched predictions are mostly wrong, Rajesh takes prides in his accuracy.

He says, "While I take a minimum four tests for a day, the MET office remains content with one." Rajesh's next step is to build a NOOA high-resolution (HRPT) station at home to improve the resolution's images from 4 kilometres to a pixel to 1 kilometre to a pixel. This man's not going to be caught in the rain without an umbrella.

Taken from:: http://in.news.yahoo.com