Yr2 Underspend: Interaction of Convective Organization and Monsoon Precipitation, Atmosphere, Surface and Sea

The monsoon supplies the majority of South Asia's water, yet forecasters still cannot reliably predict its daily downpours or seasonal shifts. A large collaboration between Indian and UK scientists aims to fix this by flying the UK's FAAM research aircraft through monsoon clouds while Indian teams take ground-based measurements. The core problem is a lack of observations—current models have little real data to work with, especially over the ocean and in the atmosphere above India. The project will use these new measurements to build an Indo-UK forecasting model that works down to scales of 100 metres, far finer than today's models. If successful, the research could transform how farmers, water managers, and disaster planners prepare for monsoon floods and droughts across a region where hundreds of millions depend on the rains for their livelihoods. The work is applied, not fundamental: it targets a specific operational gap in weather prediction, with the explicit goal of improving forecasts from days to seasons ahead.