IGNOU, IMD sign agreement for installing automatic weather station

NEW DELHI: The Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU) and India Meteorological Department, ministry of earth sciences (MoES), signed an agreement for installing an automatic weather station (AWS) at IGNOU Maidan Garhi Campus, New Delhi. The agreement was signed by IGNOU registrar Alok Chaube and Charan Singh, DDMG, RIMC, Indian Meteorological Department (IMD).

IGNOU vice-chancellor (VC) Nageshwar Rao and the university pro-vice chancellors Srikant Mohapatra, Sumitra Kukreti and Kiran Hazarika were also present on the occasion. IGNOU Schools of Science director Meenal Mishra highlighted how the installation of automatic weather station will be useful to IGNOU faculty members, researchers, and students from various disciplines such as geology, geoinformatics, geography, environmental sciences, agriculture, etc. in their project work and research involving meteorological and environmental data.

The station will also be useful for awareness purposes to the local community. Mishra added that it will be mutually beneficial for IGNOU to collaborate with IMD on shared interests. A professor of IGNOU Charan Singh said since its founding in 1875, IMD has been offering weather and climatic services to the public and specialised agencies.

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“To provide location-specific observations and warning services within urban agglomerations, IMD has started to expand its urban services and is installing more such stations in important cities, including Delhi-NCR. Meteorological data, including temperature, relative humidity, rainfall, wind direction, wind speed, and pressure, are continuously recorded by AWS, which are crucial for academics and students conducting research particularly in the field of environmental, climate and atmospheric sciences,” he added.

IGNOU V-C Nageshwar Rao appreciated the School of Sciences for launching the AWS and several masters programmes. He said that the data generated will be useful for students and researchers. The IMD team also visited the Electronic Media Production Centre (EMPC, IGNOU).