Many of us look online or rely on the weather reports to find out what the climate and temperature is going to be like.

However, the coffee plants in the Kodagu region of Karnataka have apparently come up with a rather different way of doing things.

According to reports, they have decided to use an unusual means of working out what is happening: by using a balloon.

How does this weather prediction method work?

Apparently, the balloon is filled with helium gas and is equipped with instruments which are able to study the weather systems.

For instance, it is said that the equipment would be able to determine whether rain was likely within a period of around 4 days.

Of course, this information is vitally important to the coffee farmers.

The information will help them work out whether to incur the costs of using sprinklers to irrigate the coffee crops, for example.

The information which is collected by the equipment in the weather balloon would be used alongside information which is collected from the other automatic weather stations (there are about 25 of them) in Kodagu.

Further calculations will then be made by the Madhapur station and sent on to the Indian Space Research Organisation’s research section.

Why go to all this trouble?

Apparently, this way of monitoring the changing weather patterns is an attempt to get predictions which are as accurate as they can be.

The coffee planters have contributed towards the cost of the operation and the Indian Space Research Organisation has agreed to help out too.

source: http://www.WorldCoffeeNews.com / by Clive / Thursday, April 05th, 2012