India's first SkyCast aviation weather system opens at Delhi

An integrated atmospheric remote-sensing system for fog and turbulence, developed under Mission Mausam.

What happened

• India's first SkyCast System was inaugurated at Indira Gandhi International (IGI) Airport, New Delhi, by the Union Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Science & Technology and Earth Sciences.
• With this installation, India becomes the 19th country in the world to operate such an integrated aviation-weather monitoring system — only 18 comparable systems existed globally before this.
• SkyCast is an integrated atmospheric remote-sensing system that fuses several instruments into one real-time picture of the air column above the airport, specifically to read fog and turbulence.
• It was developed under Mission Mausam, the Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES) programme to upgrade India's weather observation and forecasting capacity.
• After the Delhi installation, the second facility is planned at Jewar Airport (Noida International Airport), followed by progressive expansion to other airports across India.
• Beyond aviation, the system's observations are intended to feed forecasting models, AI-enabled decision support, urban weather forecasting, pollution management, transport advisories and disaster preparedness.

Background & context

SkyCast does not appear from nowhere — it is the operational product of a decade of focused fog research at this very airport. Its scientific foundation is the Winter Fog Experiment (WiFEX), jointly launched by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) and the India Meteorological Department (IMD) — both under the Ministry of Earth Sciences — at IGI Airport in 2015. WiFEX was set up because dense winter fog over the Indo-Gangetic Plain repeatedly paralyses north-Indian aviation, road and rail movement every December and January, and India lacked the high-resolution observations needed to forecast the onset, intensity and clearing of that fog. Years of WiFEX measurements built the physical understanding of how fog forms, thickens and lifts over Delhi; SkyCast converts that research base into a permanent, real-time operational alerting service.

The umbrella for SkyCast is Mission Mausam, the Ministry of Earth Sciences' flagship initiative to make India "weather-ready and climate-smart" by sharply expanding observational infrastructure — additional Doppler Weather Radars, wind profilers, radiometers and ocean-atmosphere sensors — and improving the accuracy and lead time of forecasts and nowcasts. The MoES Secretary noted at the launch that, under Mission Mausam, advanced observational networks including Doppler Weather Radars are being expanded across the country. SkyCast is therefore best understood as one named, airport-scale deliverable inside the larger Mission Mausam build-out rather than as a standalone scheme. The administering chain runs from the Ministry of Earth Sciences (the nodal ministry) down through its institutions — IMD as the national meteorological service and IITM as the research arm — with operational users being the airport operator, airlines, pilots and air-traffic-management agencies.

It helps to place the five instruments in plain terms, because the likely Prelims test is matching each to what it senses. A Radar Wind Profiler sends radio pulses upward and reads how the air's motion shifts their echo, giving a vertical profile of wind speed, direction, turbulence and vertical velocity — here, up to nearly 3 km, the full depth of the planetary boundary layer that matters for fog. SODAR (Sonic Detection and Ranging) does the same job acoustically at low levels, using sound pulses to sound out near-surface winds and thermal structure. A Microwave Radiometer passively measures the microwave radiation the atmosphere emits to retrieve continuous profiles of temperature and humidity — the variables that decide whether and when saturated air will condense into fog. The Ground-based Fog Aerosol Spectrometer (GFAS) counts and sizes the tiny droplets and aerosol particles that seed and thicken fog, capturing the aerosol–fog interaction directly. The CL61 Lidar-based Ceilometer fires a laser upward and times the back-scatter to map the vertical structure and depth of the fog or cloud layer. Read together in real time, these five readings let forecasters see fog forming, deepening or lifting before the human eye on the runway can — which is what makes the ~3-hour advance nowcast possible.

For Prelims

• What it is: SkyCast — India's first integrated atmospheric remote-sensing system for aviation weather monitoring, focused on fog and turbulence nowcasting.
• Where & when: Inaugurated at IGI Airport, New Delhi, on 2026-05-29; India is the 19th country to install such a system.
• Parent programme: Developed under Mission Mausam; nodal ministry is the Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES).
• Scientific base: The Winter Fog Experiment (WiFEX), run jointly by IITM and IMD at IGI Airport since 2015.
• Five integrated instruments: (1) Radar Wind Profiler, (2) SODAR, (3) Microwave Radiometer, (4) Ground-based Fog Aerosol Spectrometer (GFAS), and (5) CL61 Lidar-based Ceilometer.
• Core sensor: An advanced boundary-layer Radar Wind Profiler that measures wind speed, wind direction, turbulence, vertical velocity and boundary-layer dynamics up to nearly 3 km above the airport.
• GFAS: Gives detailed information on fog droplets, aerosols and aerosol–fog interactions — the micro-physics of how fog forms.
• CL61 Lidar Ceilometer: Monitors the vertical structure of fog (how thick the fog layer is and how high it extends).
• What it delivers: Accurate nowcasting and early-warning services to pilots, airlines, airport operators and air-traffic-management agencies, with advance alerts in short windows of around three hours.
• Expansion path: Next facility at Jewar (Noida International) Airport, then other airports.
• What it is NOT: SkyCast is not a satellite and not a Doppler Weather Radar; it is a ground-based, integrated profiling system that reads the lowest few kilometres of the atmosphere (the boundary layer) directly above the airport. It is also not itself a scheme or a ministry — it is a system built under the Mission Mausam programme of MoES. And it is not a long-range forecasting tool: it does nowcasting (very-short-range, ~3-hour) warnings, not seasonal outlooks.

The full family to keep straight for "match the pairs" and "how many of these" questions: Mission Mausam (the umbrella programme, MoES) → WiFEX (the research experiment that seeded the science, IITM + IMD, 2015) → SkyCast (the operational airport system, India's 19th-in-the-world). Sitting alongside in the MoES weather-observation stack are the Doppler Weather Radar network (precipitation and storm tracking) and the IMD's seasonal Long Range Forecast for the southwest monsoon — both distinct from SkyCast's short-range, boundary-layer fog focus. Pairing the five instruments to their jobs is the likely test: Radar Wind Profiler → wind/turbulence/vertical velocity to ~3 km; SODAR → low-level acoustic wind sounding; Microwave Radiometer → temperature/humidity profiles; GFAS → fog droplets and aerosols; CL61 Lidar Ceilometer → vertical fog structure.

Why it matters

The problem SkyCast addresses is concrete and seasonal. Every winter, dense fog over the Indo-Gangetic Plain — Delhi most acutely — collapses visibility at IGI Airport, India's busiest. The consequences are delayed and cancelled flights, costly diversions, knock-on disruption across the national aviation network, and safety risk during low-visibility landings and take-offs. Until now, forecasting exactly when fog would set in, how dense it would become and when it would lift was difficult, because the relevant action happens in the lowest few kilometres of the atmosphere — the boundary layer — which conventional surface stations and satellites read poorly. SkyCast directly instruments that boundary layer: by combining wind-profiling, acoustic sounding, microwave temperature/humidity profiling, aerosol spectrometry and lidar ceilometry, it produces a continuous, vertically-resolved picture of how fog is evolving in real time. The ~3-hour advance alerts give pilots, airlines, airport operators and air-traffic managers enough lead time to re-sequence landings, manage holding patterns, reduce avoidable diversions and cancellations, and improve safety margins. The wider value is that the same dense observations feed forecasting models, AI-enabled decision support, urban weather and pollution management (fog and pollution share aerosol drivers), transport advisories and disaster preparedness — so a system installed for aviation also strengthens India's broader weather-resilience stack under Mission Mausam.

The exam-relevant significance is also institutional. SkyCast shows the maturing pipeline from a field experiment to a permanent public service: a research programme (WiFEX) running quietly at the airport since 2015 has now produced an operational system that India can replicate at other airports. It also signals where India sits internationally — being the 19th country to field such an integrated setup places it within a small group of nations with this class of boundary-layer aviation-weather capability, which is a useful data point for answers on India's standing in applied atmospheric science. Finally, the dual-use design — aviation safety plus pollution, urban forecasting and disaster preparedness — illustrates how observation infrastructure built for one sector compounds in value across governance, the kind of cross-cutting payoff that strengthens a Mains argument for investment in scientific public goods.

For Mains

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