Convective scale nowcasting for Thunderstorms, Hail & Cloudbursts (06 hr)
Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES) · Disaster Management · Software
Three of the four severity outputs need labelled data that does not exist for India and two of the three input streams are not public — if you take it, scope to satellite-based convective initiation detection and be honest that hail and downburst velocity are out of reach.
What it actually is
Severe storms with hail and damaging winds form within minutes at scales that ordinary weather models cannot see, and the six hours before they arrive is the only window in which anyone can act. The ask is a fast system fusing radar, satellite and lightning observations to detect storms as they begin and forecast their severity at a scale of a few kilometres.
What to build
A real-time fusion and nowcasting engine at the resolution and lead time the statement fixes, ingesting radar reflectivity and velocity fields, geostationary thermal and infrared imagery and ground lightning detection into a common grid at high cadence, detecting convective initiation from rapid cloud-top cooling and low-level convergence signatures before a storm is mature, then forecasting the four severity parameters the statement names individually — lightning strike density, hail probability, downburst velocity and cloudburst rainfall thresholds — as gridded fields out to six hours, presented on a GIS dashboard with hazard zones and arrival countdowns per location, and verified with categorical scores against an advection baseline.
Smallest thing that wins the room
Replay a severe convective afternoon and show the system detecting initiation before the storm matured, with the hazard zone and arrival countdown for a named town matching when the storm actually arrived.
How crowded this one gets
A guess, projected from the 2025 statements — the last year where both the submission counts and the winners were published.
Quieter than 40% of the 226 · #136 of 226 by expected field
A normal-sized field. Your idea has to be good, not miraculous.
Why: central ministry statements sat below the average.
This is a guess, not a fact
Nobody has published 2026’s numbers yet. This is an analysed estimate from last year’s pattern, so please do not take it as the truth — check the live counter on the SIH portal before you decide anything. The range covers the middle half of likely outcomes, so one statement in two lands outside it. Entry closes at 500 ideas per statement, so no range goes past that — a statement that reaches the cap fills and shuts rather than drawing an unlimited crowd. The model reads only three things a team can see before choosing — software or hardware, the theme, and what kind of body posted it — and those explain about a quarter of the variation in last year’s field sizes (R² 0.25 on held-out statements). Trust the band more than the number, and the ordering more than either. It cannot see how good your idea is, which is the part that actually decides it.
The scores
The number is the shorthand. The line under it is the reason.
Acceptance potential
2/5Four distinct severity parameters each need labelled observations that are not available for India, two of the three named input streams are not openly distributed, and this statement substantially duplicates two others in the same cycle — so you would be competing against near-identical submissions on a problem where the data does not support the stated outputs.
Feasibility
3/5Satellite imagery is free and sufficient to nowcast convective development on its own, but the statement's other two named inputs are not openly distributed in India — radar products are only selectively public and bulk lightning network data is not — and each of the four severity parameters needs its own labelled event record that does not exist for this region.
Innovation scope
3/5The lead time, resolution, data sources, fusion approach and the four forecast parameters are all specified, so what remains open is the architecture and how you handle detection of initiation, which is genuinely the interesting part.
Clarity
4/5Precise about the operational envelope — zero to six hours, one to three kilometres, the three input streams and the four severity outputs are all named — though it says nothing about verification or what accuracy would make the system useful.
Effort
HeavyA high-cadence multi-source ingestion engine, initiation detection, four separate severity forecasts and a live GIS dashboard with arrival timing is five components, and aligning streams arriving at different cadences and resolutions is the persistent difficulty.
Demo-ability
MediumA replay showing initiation caught before maturity with a correct arrival countdown is compelling, but it depends on you having found an event with all three data streams available, and probability fields need interpretation.
In its favour
- Green flag: Detecting convective initiation before a storm is mature is the genuinely valuable capability here and is the one thing advection-based nowcasting fundamentally cannot do, so it is both the hard part and the differentiator
- Green flag: Geostationary satellite imagery alone is free and sufficient to build a working convective nowcast, so the project is viable even without radar and lightning access
- Green flag: The arrival countdown per location is an unusually concrete and legible output for a meteorological product and gives you a demo moment that needs no explanation
- Green flag: Categorical verification against an advection baseline is well established, so you can demonstrate real skill rather than showing a plausible animation
Against it
- Red flag: Hail probability, downburst velocity and lightning strike density each require labelled observation records that are not publicly available for India, so three of the four stated outputs cannot be trained or verified properly
- Red flag: Two of the three named input streams are not openly distributed, so the multi-source fusion architecture the statement is built around may reduce to satellite-only in practice — plan for that from the start
- Red flag: This statement substantially overlaps two others in the same cycle covering thunderstorm and cloudburst nowcasting, so you will be compared directly against near-identical submissions and need a clear reason yours differs
- Red flag: Advection of the current field is a strong short-range baseline, and a system that does not beat it at two hours has demonstrated nothing regardless of how sophisticated the fusion is
What you will be writing
- multi-source high-cadence data fusion pipeline
- convective initiation detection from CTT cooling rate
- ConvLSTM or U-Net severity field nowcasting
- Doppler radar reflectivity and velocity ingestion
- optical flow advection baseline
- GIS hazard zone dashboard with arrival timing
- Convective nowcasting
- Severe storm warning
- Multi-sensor data fusion
Prior art to read before you start
convective initiation detection · severe storm parameter nowcasting · radar and satellite data fusion
Analysed by Claude Opus. Every score above is a judgment call with its reasoning attached — kindly cross-check this against the official statement on the SIH portal before your team commits to it.