Skymet Weather
Overview
Skymet Weather is the public face of Skymet Weather Services, a private Indian weather forecasting company headquartered in Noida, Uttar Pradesh. Through its website, skymetweather.com, published in English and Hindi editions, it provides forecasts, monsoon analysis, weather news and warnings to the general public, while the company behind it supplies professional weather services to media houses, farmers, insurers, power companies and other industries. It is routinely described as India's largest private-sector weather forecasting and agriculture-risk solutions company, and it holds a distinctive place in Indian media history as the first private entity to supply weather forecasts and weather graphics to Indian media.
For most readers, Skymet Weather is encountered as a news source rather than a contractor: its monsoon outlook each spring is reported across Indian newspapers and television, its cyclone and heavy-rain updates are shared during extreme weather, and its website and apps offer city-level forecasts free to anyone. This profile covers both sides of that identity — the consumer-facing weather portal listed here, and the forecasting organisation whose work the portal publishes.
Founding and History
Skymet was founded in 2003 by Jatin Singh, who remains its founder and managing director. Singh came from television journalism, and the company's first client, in its founding year, was the Sahara Samay news channel — an origin that explains Skymet's early specialisation in broadcast weather: forecasts and graphics packaged for television. From that media foothold, the company expanded into a full forecasting service, supplying weather content and graphics to many of India's major news organisations, among them Zee News, Aaj Tak, Times Now, ABP and The Hindu, and to information clients such as Thomson Reuters.
A turning point in its public reputation came during Cyclone Phailin, which struck India's eastern coast in 2013; Skymet's forecasts were widely used as a reference point alongside international services. The company also built a reputation around the annual monsoon, at times issuing its long-range outlook ahead of the official forecast and publicly claiming greater accuracy than the state forecaster in several years. Over two decades, what began as a media-graphics supplier grew into a data company with its own nationwide observation network — the foundation on which the public website's forecasts rest.
The Monsoon Forecast
No part of Skymet Weather's output draws more attention than its monsoon forecast. The southwest monsoon supplies roughly seventy percent of India's annual rainfall, so a long-range prediction of whether the season will be normal, below normal or above normal is national economic news, affecting farm planning, reservoir management, insurance and government preparation for drought or flood. Skymet issues its outlook using its own models and observation data, and its announcements — for example, a below-normal call in a year when the official agency expected near-normal rain — are debated by meteorologists and reported as a story in themselves.
The portal supports that headline forecast with continuing monsoon journalism through the season: onset and progress reports, rainfall-deficit tallies by region, and analysis of what the pattern means for crops. This combination — a proprietary seasonal prediction, followed by daily tracking against it — is the clearest example of how Skymet Weather functions simultaneously as a forecasting service and a specialised newsroom.
Weather News, Forecasts and Warnings
Day to day, the website publishes the standard repertoire of a weather news service in an Indian context: city and district forecasts, heatwave and cold-wave coverage, thunderstorm and lightning alerts, cyclone tracking during the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal seasons, and explainers on the systems — western disturbances, low-pressure areas, troughs — behind the weather. Its reporting is written for a general audience but grounded in the company's professional forecasting operation, which produces hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, seasonal and long-term forecasts.
Because India spans very different climate regimes, the coverage is intensely regional: the portal follows northeast monsoon rain in the south, winter rain and snow in the Himalayan states, pre-monsoon storms in the east and heat across the northern plains, often in the same week. During severe events, this regional granularity — down to likely affected districts — is the practical value readers seek from it.
Observation Network and Technology
Skymet's forecasts rest on physical infrastructure it built itself. Company and profile sources describe a network of thousands of automated weather stations across India — figures cited include more than 6,500 observation centres, and close to 7,500 automated weather stations, alongside lightning detectors, air-quality sensors and hundreds of agricultural sensors that monitor crop conditions at a micro scale. These stations stream real-time data on rainfall, temperature, thunder, lightning and heat, which the company combines with satellite data and its own numerical weather prediction models, run at meso and micro scales.
The company has also developed software tools for weather and climate decision support, and it has collaborated internationally on forecast improvement, including work with the US National Center for Atmospheric Research's DICast system to sharpen tropical and monsoon forecasting. Services listed for the company include weather monitoring and forecasting, UAV and remote-sensing work, and crop surveillance — a reminder that the public website is the visible tip of a data business.
Services for Agriculture, Energy, Insurance and Media
Beyond the public portal, Skymet sells weather intelligence to sectors where forecasts change financial decisions. In agriculture, it provides crop surveillance and weather-based advice that helps farmers time sowing, irrigation, pesticide and fertiliser use, and it works with NGOs on farmer livelihoods in remote blocks across many states. Its data underpins crop-insurance work, and its founder also established Gramcover, a technology-backed rural insurance distribution business. In energy, it supplies wind and solar forecasts to renewable-energy companies and forecasting to power utilities; in finance and insurance, weather data supports risk assessment for major insurers; and it provides marine weather forecasts to shipping-related clients.
Media remains a core market: the weather graphics and feeds Skymet supplies appear on television channels and in newspapers and digital outlets across India, which means many Indians consume Skymet forecasts without visiting its site at all. The website, in that sense, is both a product and a shop window for the services behind it.
Website, Apps and Language Access
The consumer service is free. The website lets any user check forecasts for their location, read weather news and follow seasonal analysis, and the company launched Android and iOS apps carrying the same information. Its app was noted as the first made-in-India weather app to offer information in multiple regional languages — a significant accessibility step in a country where weather warnings and farm advice are most useful in the reader's own language. The portal itself is listed here as an English and Hindi publication, reflecting its bilingual news pages.
Social and video distribution extend the service further during high-impact weather, when short updates travel faster than a website visit. For farmers in particular, the pathway from a Skymet station's data to a phone alert in a regional language illustrates the company's founding intention, stated by its founder, of making reliable forecasts accessible rather than locked inside official bulletins.
Audience and Public Role
Skymet Weather's audience is unusually broad for a specialist service: television viewers who see its graphics, farmers who plan around its advisories, businesses that buy its data, journalists who cite its monsoon outlook, and ordinary readers checking whether it will rain. Company profiles credit its agricultural work with reaching millions of farmers through satellite data and ground sensors, and its observation network spans around twenty Indian states.
Its public role is also that of a private counterpoint to the India Meteorological Department. The existence of a well-known private forecaster changed Indian weather culture: monsoon prediction became a contest reported in the press, and private data networks became part of disaster and farm planning. Skymet's prominence during events such as Cyclone Phailin showed a private company being treated, in a crisis, as a reference source alongside global providers.
How to Read and Use Skymet Weather
For everyday use, readers can check their city forecast on the website or app, follow the news section during active weather, and consult the monsoon coverage each season for the long-range outlook and its updates. Readers with professional needs — in agriculture, energy, insurance, media or logistics — should treat the public site as an introduction and approach the company for its paid data, forecasting and risk services.
As a directory entry, Skymet Weather represents a distinctive category of online news: a specialist information service whose journalism is inseparable from its own instruments and models. Its authority comes not from reporting what others announce, but from measuring the atmosphere itself, thousands of stations at a time, and publishing what the data says.
