On September 27, 2024, something big happened. No breaking news banners. No dramatic headlines. Just a quiet announcement that India had commissioned Arka and Arunika, two of the most powerful weather-focused supercomputers in the world.
It wasn’t just a tech upgrade. It was a climate preparedness revolution quietly launched, but carrying the power to save lives and livelihoods.
The Rise of Arka and Arunika
Unveiled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, these High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems have been designed specifically for weather and climate research. Together, they mark a ₹850 crore investment by the Ministry of Earth Sciences to elevate India’s forecasting capability to the next level.
Arka, housed at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) in Pune, delivers a staggering 11.77 PetaFLOPS of computing power with 33 petabytes of storage. Arunika, installed at the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (NCMRWF) in Noida, adds another 8.24 PetaFLOPS with 24 petabytes of storage.
For context: together, they raise India’s total weather-computing power to 22 PetaFLOPS, up from just 6.8. That’s a tripling of capability almost overnight.
Why the Names Matter
Like their predecessors Aditya, Bhaskara, Pratyush, and Mihir - Arka and Arunika are named after celestial bodies tied to the sun, our planet’s original and most vital energy source. It’s a poetic nod to the force that drives Earth’s weather systems, and to the ancient wisdom that always looked up to the sky for answers.
But this isn’t mythology. This is machine learning, physics, and billions of data points brought together under one digital sky.
From Climate Chaos to Predictive Precision
Extreme weather isn’t a future problem. It’s already here cyclones, flash floods, record heatwaves. What Arka and Arunika promise is speed and precision in how we respond.
By enabling higher-resolution models down to 1 km over Indian regions these systems can simulate and predict cyclones, thunderstorms, droughts, and heatwaves with far greater accuracy and lead time. That means better disaster preparedness, more effective evacuation planning, smarter agriculture, and safer transportation.
Even more transformative is the dedicated AI/ML system delivering 1.9 PetaFLOPS which will allow India’s meteorologists to develop adaptive, real-time models that get smarter with every weather event.
And Yes, There's an App for That
You don’t need to be a scientist to benefit. The Sachet app, available to the public, takes all this high-powered science and distills it into hyper-local weather alerts, updated every four hours using India’s new Bharat Forecast System (BFS). It’s weather intelligence delivered directly to your phone.
Whether you're a farmer in Maharashtra, a fisherman off the Tamil Nadu coast, or a commuter in Delhi Sachet helps you stay one step ahead of the sky.
India’s Weather Forecast Just Got a Major Upgrade And There's an App for That!
🔗 Read it here
Quiet Innovation, Loud Impact
While countries like the US and UK operate high-resolution weather models, few match what India has now accomplished: a nationwide system of this scale, this speed, and this sophistication.
This is the kind of infrastructure that doesn’t just make headlines. It makes futures more certain in an uncertain climate.
And in that quiet unveiling of Arka and Arunika, India made it clear: the forecast is changing not just the weather, but how we prepare for it.
P.S. If you're interested in the future of interactive learning through documents and smart summarization, try Hilaight a tool we’re building to help you explore documents the intelligent way.