TNAU AAS

Success of monsoon based agriculture depends on the climate that prevailed during the particular cropping season.Providing real time weather information based agro advisory to the farmers could minimize the risk and losses due to extreme climate.
In order to improve the accuracy of present weather forecasting, weather information are required at high spatial and temporal resolution. Installation and interlinking of automatic weather stations (AWS) at block level will be helpful to avoid climaterisks and increase the productivity by timely weather based agro advisory.

In this context, Government of Tamil Nadu under National Agricultural Development Project (NADP) has funded Rs. 29.83 crores for establishing Tamil Nadu Agriculture Weather Network (TAWN) by installing 385 AWS, each one per block. During 2007-10, in the first phase 224 AWS were installed with a total outlay of Rs. 16.90 crores and 161 AWS were installed in the second phase during 2011 -16.

Agro Climate Research Centre (ACRC), Directorate of Crop Management, Tamil Nadu Agricultural University (TNAU), Coimbatore in collaboration with Department of Agriculture, Tamil Nadu established the Tamil Nadu Agriculture Weather Network (TAWN). In this network, 10 types of agricultural related weather parameters viz., maximum temperature, minimum temperature, rainfall, relative humidity, wind speed, wind direction, soil moisture, soil temperature, leaf wetness, sunshine hours, solar radiation are collected from 385 AWS at hourly interval and hosted in this public domain www.tawn.tnau.ac.in. The daily, weekly and monthly weather data are also calculated and hosted in this website at block level. The medium range weather forecast at block level is being generated by using these weather parameters is also hosted every day with a lead time of six days.