Government of India has established system of Air quality, Weather forecasting and Research (SAFAR) in which of the following four cities for research on air quality assessment, weather forecasting ?

Question

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Correct — option (1), Delhi, Pune, Ahmedabad, Mumbai. SAFAR stands for the System of Air Quality and Weather Forecasting And Research, and it is a national initiative of the Ministry of Earth Sciences, developed indigenously by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology at Pune with the India Meteorological Department as its operational partner. Its purpose is not merely to measure air quality but to forecast it: the system runs a network of monitoring stations across a city, feeds their readings together with emission inventories and meteorological data into a numerical model, and issues a location-specific air quality index with a forecast for the coming days, colour-coded so that a citizen or a city administration can act on it in advance rather than after the fact. It has been established in four cities, and the four are Delhi, Mumbai, Pune and Ahmedabad. The reason all three wrong options look plausible is that they replace one or two of these with another large metropolitan city — Chennai, Kolkata, Hyderabad or Bengaluru — on the reasonable but incorrect assumption that a scheme of this kind must simply cover the four biggest cities in the country. It does not. Delhi and Mumbai are on the list for the obvious reason that they are the country's largest urban agglomerations with severe air quality problems; Pune is on it in large part because the institute that built the system, IITM, is located there, which made the city the natural place to develop and validate the model; and Ahmedabad is the fourth. Holding the list as 'the two obvious metros plus the developer's own city plus Ahmedabad' is a more reliable way to remember it than trying to recall four names in isolation.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) This is the four-biggest-metros answer, and it is exactly the guess the question is designed to catch. It keeps Delhi and Mumbai, which are on the real list, and substitutes Chennai and Kolkata for Pune and Ahmedabad. Neither Chennai nor Kolkata is among the four cities where SAFAR was established. The underlying error is treating city size as the selection criterion for a research and forecasting system, when the actual list reflects where the developing institute is based and where the initial deployments were made.  (c) This option also keeps the two correct metros and replaces Pune and Ahmedabad with Hyderabad and Chennai, neither of which is one of SAFAR's four cities. Hyderabad is a common substitution in questions about national scientific and monitoring networks because it hosts several central institutions, and its presence here is meant to look institutionally plausible. But SAFAR's association is with the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology at Pune, and Pune's absence from this option is the decisive omission.  (d) This substitutes Bengaluru and Chennai for Pune and Ahmedabad. Bengaluru is a natural-looking inclusion in any list of Indian cities associated with science and technology, which is what makes it an effective distractor, but it is not one of the four cities where SAFAR was established. As with the other wrong options, the giveaway is that Pune is missing: a candidate who remembers that the system was built by IITM Pune can eliminate every option that leaves Pune out, which disposes of all three wrong choices at once.

Concept: Air quality management needs three distinct capabilities, and SAFAR was built to supply all of them in the cities where it operates. The first is measurement — a network of automatic monitoring stations recording the concentration of pollutants such as particulate matter of 10 and 2.5 micrometre size, nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide and ozone. The second is communication — converting many pollutant readings into a single number a non-specialist can act on, which is the function of the air quality index. India's National Air Quality Index, launched in 2015, does this on a six-category scale running from Good through Satisfactory, Moderately Polluted, Poor and Very Poor to Severe, computed from eight pollutants. The third and hardest is forecasting — predicting what the air will be like tomorrow and the day after, which requires an emission inventory for the city, a weather model, and a chemical transport model that moves and transforms pollutants in the simulated atmosphere. It is this forecasting capability that distinguishes SAFAR from ordinary monitoring, because a forecast lets a city act before the pollution arrives: restrict construction, adjust traffic, or issue a health advisory to vulnerable groups.

State PCS 2024 Q33 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q33 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer