Post News Network
Bhubaneswar, April 23: An astonishing 118 automatic weather stations out of the total of 214 in the state are lying defunct at the district and block levels, hampering the prediction of parameters such as rainfall and temperature made by the weather officials.
The automatic weather stations are meant to map minimum and maximum temperature along with rainfall and send raw data to the India Meteorological Department (IMD) in Pune.
Weather officials at the Pune office then collate and process the data and then send it back to Bhubaneswar Met centre. The 214 automatic weather stations installed by the IMD at block, tehsil and collectors’ offices are meant to be maintained by ground level officials.
However, 118 of them are defunct because of the alleged negligence of district officials.
“The stations are installed at the district and block levels. The meteorological centre in Bhubaneswar does not have the manpower to maintain the stations at the ground level. These have to be maintained by district and block level officials,” said an official at the Met centre here.
IMD has installed weather stations that run on solar power. However, the solar batteries were reportedly stolen resulting in the non-functioning of these units. “District officials complain that the stations are defunct as solar batteries have been stolen. However, it is their duty to ensure the security of the machines not us,” said the official.
Met director Sarat Sahu told Orissa POST that the problems will be resolved and the stations will be restarted soon. “We have already procured batteries and other parts to repair and restart the weather stations. Work on defunct stations will resume soon,” said the director.