New Delhi, Nov. 5: India and the US are likely to announce during President Barack Obama’s visit here a joint research initiative on clean energy, and a plan to improve India’s monsoon forecasts using a weather simulation model developed in the US.

Indian government sources said the initiative on clean energy would seek to develop a consortium of academic institutions and industries from the two countries to jointly pursue research in areas such as solar energy, biofuels and energy efficiency.

India’s science and technology and biotechnology departments will execute the programme for which each government plans to commit $25 million over the next five years, with an expectation of an equal contribution from consortium partners, a senior official said.

“We hope this will lead to joint high-end research, aimed at novel technologies in these areas,” the official who is familiar with the initiative told The Telegraph.

The clean energy initiative will call for proposals from academic institutions and industry partners, and promising proposals would be supported, another official said.

Clean energy is widely seen as a “common priority” issue for both countries.

“US research combined with India’s proven success in frugal innovation will drive down costs of clean energy and accelerate the deployment of clean energy technologies in both countries,” experts from the Washington DC-based World Resources Institute said on Thursday, ahead of Obama’s visit.

Indian and US officials also plan to ink during the US President’s visit another science agreement under which India’s ministry of earth sciences will get to scientifically tweak a US-designed weather prediction model to try and improve forecasts of the Indian monsoon.

“We’ll have to tailor the model for the South Asian region,” said a source in the ministry of earth sciences. “It won’t happen overnight — it could take three years, perhaps five years, before we can see an effect.”

A weather model is a set of mathematical rules to predict the weather using initial conditions of the atmosphere over the land and the sea. The effort to customise the US model will involve incorporating physics that reflects local conditions over South Asia and the Indian Ocean and assimilation of weather data from these areas, the source said.

The US Climate Forecast Model (CFM), developed at the National Centres for Environmental Prediction, is described as a “fully-coupled model” that represents the interactions between the Earth’s oceans, land and atmosphere. The US began to use it in August 2004.

India’s National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting, New Delhi, and the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, are among the institutions that will try to harness the model for the monsoon.

India and the US have also been discussing possible text for a commercial space launch agreement that will enable the launch of American satellites and satellites with US-made components aboard India’s commercial launch rockets such as the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle.

“We hope that there will be a satisfactory conclusion of such an agreement during the visit, although one cannot guarantee this,” foreign secretary Nirupama Rao had said at a special briefing here on Thursday.