Indian monsoon forecasting is facing a major problem due to the alarming presence of Somalia pirates in the Indian Ocean.
Hyderabad-based Dr M. Ravichandran, a senior scientist with the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services pointed out that since the western Indian Ocean is a piracy notified area, “we are not in a position to conduct crucial experiments in that zone”.
“The result is that while the world scientific community can get weather data from the Bay of Bengal, the eastern equatorial and central Indian Ocean, it does not have access to the western Indian Ocean along the African Coast,” Dr Ravichandran said.
This lack of access to data has adversely impacted information availability on the Indian, African and the Australian monsoons.
Dr Ravichandran reveals that they have approached the Indian navy to provide protection to scientific vessels plying these trouble waters but talks have not made much headway.
The experiment titled Research Moored Buoy Array (RMBA) involves placing huge “buoys” into an ocean at the depth of 500 metres in order to study the temperature, salinity and other conditions found at those depths. Large vessels are required to ply these buoys which is not possible given the frequency of pirate attacks.
In 2012, Somalia pirates have attacked 99 ships plying in these waters.
“We need to place RMBA‘s in 46 locations in the Indian Ocean but have presently succeeded in deploying 31 RMBAs,” Dr Ravichandran said.
“We need to collect ocean information from different sources and the western Indian ocean is a crucial because the western end comprises the Indian Ocean Diapole (the Indian Diapole has an east and west side where wind reversal takes place),” he said.