India has launched its first SkyCast System at Delhi's Indira Gandhi International Airport, a significant development aimed at mitigating the annual disruption caused by dense winter fog. This integrated atmospheric remote sensing system, making India the 19th country to adopt such technology, utilizes multiple sensors including a Radar Wind Profiler, Ground-based Fog Aerosol Spectrometer, Lidar-based Ceilometer, Microwave Radiometer, and SODAR unit to provide real-time weather intelligence up to three kilometers above the airport. Drawing on over a decade of research from the Winter Fog Experiment (WiFEX) which established the impact of urban pollution on fog dynamics, SkyCast can issue advance warnings of up to three hours, aiding pilots and air traffic controllers in making critical decisions for safe landings or diversions, and its data will also contribute to broader urban weather forecasting, pollution management, and disaster preparedness efforts, with plans for expansion to other airports including Jewar.

India has launched its first SkyCast System at Delhi's Indira Gandhi International Airport, a significant development aimed at mitigating the annual disruption caused by dense winter fog. This integrated atmospheric remote sensing system, making India the 19th country to adopt such technology, utilizes multiple sensors including a Radar Wind Profiler, Ground-based Fog Aerosol Spectrometer, Lidar-based Ceilometer, Microwave Radiometer, and SODAR unit to provide real-time weather intelligence up to three kilometers above the airport. Drawing on over a decade of research from the Winter Fog Experiment (WiFEX) which established the impact of urban pollution on fog dynamics, SkyCast can issue advance warnings of up to three hours, aiding pilots and air traffic controllers in making critical decisions for safe landings or diversions, and its data will also contribute to broader urban weather forecasting, pollution management, and disaster preparedness efforts, with plans for expansion to other airports including Jewar.

India has launched its first SkyCast System at Delhi's Indira Gandhi International Airport, a significant development aimed at mitigating the annual disruption caused by dense winter fog. This integrated atmospheric remote sensing system, making India the 19th country to adopt such technology, utilizes multiple sensors including a Radar Wind Profiler, Ground-based Fog Aerosol Spectrometer, Lidar-based Ceilometer, Microwave Radiometer, and SODAR unit to provide real-time weather intelligence up to three kilometers above the airport. Drawing on over a decade of research from the Winter Fog Experiment (WiFEX) which established the impact of urban pollution on fog dynamics, SkyCast can issue advance warnings of up to three hours, aiding pilots and air traffic controllers in making critical decisions for safe landings or diversions, and its data will also contribute to broader urban weather forecasting, pollution management, and disaster preparedness efforts, with plans for expansion to other airports including Jewar.

Every winter, Delhi's Indira Gandhi International Airport, one of the busiest in Asia, is effectively held hostage by dense fog. Hundreds of flights are cancelled, diverted, or delayed for hours, stranding thousands of passengers and costing airlines crores in lost revenue. But that is all about to change, thanks to India's first SkyCast System.

On Friday, Union Minister Jitendra Singh inaugurated it at IGI Airport, making India the 19th country in the world to deploy this class of integrated atmospheric remote sensing system for aviation weather monitoring.

SkyCast is best understood as a multi-sensor atmospheric eye. Its core instrument, a boundary-layer Radar Wind Profiler, continuously measures wind speed, direction, turbulence, vertical velocity, and boundary-layer dynamics up to nearly 3 kilometres above the airport. This is the critical zone during aircraft descent and landing.

Alongside this, a Ground-based Fog Aerosol Spectrometer (GFAS) analyses fog droplets and the aerosol particles (pollution) that interact with moisture to thicken Delhi's winter fog.

A CL61 Lidar-based Ceilometer, which works like a vertical laser, continuously maps the height and structure of fog overhead.

A Microwave Radiometer and a SODAR unit round out the package, together giving pilots, air traffic controllers, and airline operators an integrated real-time weather intelligence picture.

The system can issue advance warnings within a window of approximately three hours, helping crews decide the safest moment to land or whether to divert.

The science behind SkyCast has been more than a decade in the making. It draws directly from the Winter Fog Experiment (WiFEX), jointly launched by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) and IMD at IGI Airport in 2015, one of the world's few long-running open-field experiments focused exclusively on fog.

Over ten years of data, WiFEX has yielded a high-resolution fog prediction model with more than 85 per cent accuracy for very dense fog (visibility below 200 metres).

Research also established that Delhi's urban pollution significantly alters fog dynamics—fine aerosol and sulphate particles act as fog condensation nuclei, thickening fog faster and making it linger longer than in cleaner environments such as nearby Jewar.

SkyCast's data will not remain confined to runway operations. According to the Ministry of Earth Sciences, the atmospheric profiles generated, such as temperature, humidity, and wind, will feed into advanced AI-enabled forecasting models supporting urban weather prediction, pollution management, transport advisories, and disaster preparedness.

A second SkyCast facility is planned at Jewar (Noida International Airport), followed by expansion to other Indian airports, under the government's broader Mission Mausam initiative.

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