Manual surface observatories now in all 30 districts of Odisha

Adding teeth to its existing infrastructure to make weather prediction more accurate, the India Meteorological Department’s (IMD) Regional Centre in Bhubaneswar in collaboration with the Revenue and Disaster Management of the Odisha government has been successful in installing manual observatories in all the 30 districts of Odisha.

The manual surface observatories have been set up at all the district headquarters. The observatories will help keep a continuous watch of weather parameters and events including cloud coverage.

It is pertinent to mention that seven observatories were installed at Nayagarh, Boudh, Chhatrapur, Paralakhemundi, Rayagada, Bhadrak and Jajpur during the year 2020-21.

Similarly, eight new manual observatories at Dhenkanal, Deogarh, Bargarh, Jagatsinghpur, Kendrapada, Nuapada, Khordha and Nabarangpur were set up in April 2022. With the inclusion of these eight new surface manual observatories, Odisha now has a total of 38 manual observatories covering all the 30 districts of Odisha.

“Out of these, 10 are fully operated by IMD, and the rest 28 numbers are operationalized in coordination with the Government of Odisha,” tweeted IMD’s regional centre.

Apart from the surface manual observatories, IMD has two doppler weather radar stations at Paradip and Gopalpur and six high wind speed recorders (HWSR) at Gopalpur, Puri, Bhubaneswar, Paradip, Chandbali, and Balasore.

Through this network of observatories, minute-to-minute tracking and weather forecasting for the entire State are done.