Delhi Debuts SkyCast To Tackle Fog Flight Disruptions

India has commissioned its first SkyCast aviation weather monitoring system at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport, a new tool designed to cut winter fog disruptions and give airlines more reliable operating windows at one of the world’s busiest hubs.

New System Targets Chronic Winter Fog Delays

The SkyCast system was inaugurated at Indira Gandhi International Airport on May 29, 2026, positioning Delhi as the first location in India to deploy the integrated aviation weather technology. Publicly available information indicates that the country now joins a small group of nations using similar high-end systems to manage complex weather around major airports.

Delhi’s airport has faced repeated disruption during the official fog season that typically runs from early December to early February. Recent winters have seen days when visibility dropped to under 100 metres, forcing large-scale cancellations, diversions and long delays as aircraft waited for conditions and runway capacity to improve. Reports on the 2025–26 winter season highlighted multiple days with more than 100 flights cancelled and hundreds more delayed during dense fog episodes, underscoring the operational and economic impact on airlines and passengers.

Authorities and aviation analysts have long pointed to the limits of even advanced instrument landing systems when runway capacity is saturated and visibility collapses across the region. SkyCast has been introduced as a way to supplement existing infrastructure with more precise, real-time insight into how fog layers form, evolve and disperse over the airport and its approaches.

According to published coverage of the launch, the system has been developed under the national Mission Mausam weather modernisation programme and is intended to support both flight safety and schedule resilience during India’s increasingly volatile winter weather.

How SkyCast Works Above the Runway

Technical descriptions released in connection with the inauguration show that SkyCast combines several remote-sensing instruments into a single aviation-focused platform. A radar wind profiler sits at the core of the set-up, measuring wind speed, direction, vertical motion and turbulence through the lower atmosphere up to roughly 3 kilometres above the airport.

These radar readings are complemented by a lidar-based ceilometer that maps the vertical structure of clouds and fog, helping identify the height and thickness of low-visibility layers that are critical for take-offs and landings. A ground-based fog aerosol spectrometer monitors the size and concentration of particles and droplets, an important factor in Delhi where air pollution can interact with moisture to intensify fog and reduce visibility.

Additional sensors, including sonic detection equipment and microwave radiometers, track temperature and humidity profiles and boundary-layer behaviour. Together, they create a three-dimensional, minute-by-minute picture of the atmosphere directly affecting aircraft operations, from the runway surface up through departure and arrival paths.

Reports indicate that SkyCast feeds this data into an integrated processing system designed to support short-range forecasts, often referred to as nowcasting. The platform can generate alerts on hazards such as rapidly forming fog, low-level wind shear and turbulence, typically up to a few hours in advance, giving air traffic managers and airlines more time to adjust runway configurations, sequence arrivals and departures, and refine passenger communication.

From Research Experiment to Operational Tool

The scientific backbone of SkyCast traces back to the Winter Fog Experiment, or WiFEX, a research initiative launched at Delhi airport in 2015 by national meteorological and atmospheric research institutions. WiFEX deployed instruments on and around the airfield to better understand how radiation fog developed over the Indo-Gangetic Plain and how aerosols, temperature inversions and local circulation patterns influenced visibility.

Over several fog seasons, the experiment generated an extensive dataset on the microphysics of fog and its interaction with pollution in a dense urban environment. Analysts note that Delhi is a particularly challenging location due to its combination of high emissions, shallow winter boundary layers and persistent overnight cooling, all of which tend to trap moisture and particulate matter close to the ground.

Published material from the SkyCast launch indicates that the new system operationalises many of the insights and technologies tested during WiFEX, shifting from purely observational science to an airport-integrated decision support tool. This evolution mirrors trends at major hubs in Europe, North America and East Asia, where bespoke fog and low-visibility monitoring systems have become part of routine airport operations.

SkyCast at Delhi is also expected to feed data into broader national forecasting models. The Ministry of Earth Sciences has stated in public documents that high-resolution observations from airports can improve urban weather prediction, pollution management and extreme weather preparedness beyond the aviation sector.

Implications for Airlines, Passengers and Airport Planning

For airlines, the biggest attraction of SkyCast lies in its potential to reduce uncertainty. Even with advanced instrument landing systems, winter operations at Delhi have often involved conservative scheduling, longer turnaround buffers and frequent last-minute changes. More precise short-term forecasts of fog formation and dissipation could allow carriers to plan early-morning and late-night rotations with greater confidence.

Travel industry observers note that passengers may see the benefits in the form of fewer last-minute cancellations and more accurate departure boards during the fog season. While extreme conditions will still occasionally halt operations, the expectation is that better targeting of the most vulnerable time windows, and clearer differentiation between manageable and unmanageable events, will limit the scale and duration of disruption.

Airport planners are also likely to integrate SkyCast data into longer-term decisions. Continuous records of wind, turbulence and visibility patterns above the airfield can inform future runway use strategies, taxiway design and potential changes in departure and arrival procedures aimed at both capacity and safety.

Reports on the inauguration further indicate that the SkyCast platform has been designed to work alongside, rather than replace, existing instrument landing and surface-visibility systems. The focus is not only on safe minima for individual flights but also on how the entire air traffic system at Delhi can remain more resilient during recurring fog events.

Expansion Plans and a Regional Fog Strategy

Government communications on the launch state that Delhi is the first step in a wider roll-out of SkyCast across India’s aviation network. The next installation is planned at Noida International Airport at Jewar, a new hub for the Delhi region that recently received approval for all-weather operations under its initial development phase.

The choice of Delhi and Noida as early sites reflects the particular vulnerability of northern India’s aviation corridors to winter fog. The two airports, once fully operational together, are expected to handle a large share of the country’s international and domestic traffic, making reliable low-visibility operations a strategic priority.

Beyond the capital region, Mission Mausam planning documents and media reports suggest that similar integrated weather monitoring systems, including Doppler weather radars and specialised aviation sensors, are being considered for other high-traffic airports exposed to challenging monsoon, thunderstorm and fog patterns.

Aviation analysts point out that the deployment of SkyCast coincides with broader efforts to make Delhi a so-called zero-diversion airport during fog, where flights rarely have to be rerouted to other cities due to weather alone. While achieving that goal will depend on factors ranging from airline training to airspace management, the new system represents a significant technological step toward more predictable winter flying for travellers in and out of the Indian capital.