Mid Day visits the Meteorological Department

MiD DAY visits the musty headquarters of the country's Met department in Pune

Mid Day visits the Meteorological Department

MiD DAY visits the musty headquarters of the country's Met department in Pune

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Most computer wallpapers here have sparkling blue skies and an explosion of tropical sunshine over some beach in Mauritius or Seycheles.

The monitors glow with the possibility of escape from the musty blue walls, stacks of files, old chairs, tables and equipment, and the grim, cloudy uncertainty of Pune's weather outside.

For the last week or so, the city has had this perplexing cloudiness and very little rain. Met forecasts across the country have gone awry. Waters cuts increased alarmingly.

Yesterday, MiD DAY decided to travel to the centre of India's weather affairs, the headquarters of the India Meteorological Department at busy Shivaji Nagar in Pune.

We met some of the people there, including director Medha Khole, a small-built woman who seems to like going about her work quietly.

"This is not an excuse for forecasts that have gone wrong, but tropical weather is extremely unpredictable, far more changing than weather in say an Europe or the US.

And that's a scientific fact," she said, smiling. "People blame us for predictions going wrong, but that's the nature of tropical weather."

Khole predicts light to heavy rains in Pune in the next 48 hours. She said a memorandum had been signed with France to get advanced weather tracking systems.

We went around the Victo-rian structure meeting people poring over weather charts, officials screening on their
terminals data coming from the 500-odd observatories across India in what is still called the teleprinter room (just six years ago, reams of paper would screech out of the teleprinter filled with that data).

We met the guys who handle the barometers, rain gauges and evaporimeters. The temperature on the outdoor thermometer at 4 pm was 26.5u00b0C.

Tried and tested
Almost all the equipment at the Pune headquarters are old and conventional, while the advanced equipment is kept at observatories and installations nearby.

Director of surface laboratory P N Mohanan says some of the old stuff still speaks the truest. Hardly a modern measuring wonder has surpassed the mercury barometer, for instance, invented more than 350 years ago by Torricelli.

"Conventional instruments, in the hand of trained observers, still make for standard data the world over," he said.

A really cool one out there in the lawns is the sunshine recorder. When it's really sunny, sunshine refracted through a clear glass ball burns a card kept underneath. You can figure out the sunny time from the marks on the card. One of the very few gadgets in the Met office, which do not perhaps entirely reduce moody weather into staid data.

Rain Decoded

Term used	Rainfall amount in mm
Very Light Rain	0.1 to 2.4
Light Rain	2.5 to 7.5
Moderate Rain	7.6 to 35.5
Rather Heavy rain	35.6 to 64.4
Heavy Rain	64.5 to 124.4
Very Heavy Rain	124.5 to 244.4
Extremely Heavy Rain	Equal to/greater than 244.5