Meteorological centre to be upgraded in HP

Shimla, May 27 (UNI) The Himachal Pradesh Government has decided to provide financial assistance to equip Shimla based meteorological centre with necessary infrastructure to get accurate pre cloud burst forecasts.

In a meeting to discuss upgradation of the centre, Chief Minister Prem Kumar Dhumal assured Director Manmohan Singh extending of every possible help and added that new infrastructure would help in accurate forecasting of cloudbursts and weather changes.

The Chief Minister said that the meteorological centre was of utmost important to the state since major farming activities were dependant upon the rains and natural irrigation.

''Although good irrigation infrastructure had been created to irrigate the farm land of people but still the higher reaches were dependant upon rains for irrigation purposes and recharge of water bodies,'' he added.

With the upgradation of local centre the people of the state would be informed well in time of any such natural calamity so that precautionary steps would be taken to save the life and property of people here, the Chief Minister said.

He said that upgradation of the centre would be equipped with aviation forecasting facilities and all three airports would be linked with high speed data terminals and capable of making aviation forecast to facilitate the landing and take off of the aircrafts.

The Chief Minister said the centre had four regular observatories two upper airdate observatories, 24 part time, 60 daily monitoring stations, seven other stations, six seismological observatories and two automatic weather stations.

UNI XC AS PS JS1838