New Delhi, Jan 15 : The India Meteorological Department (IMD) is celebrating its 134th Foundation Day today.

The day is being celebrated to commemorate taking over of H. F. Blanford as Imperial Meteorological Reporter on January 15, 1875.

This year, it is being celebrated with a view to promote awareness about new initiatives taken by the Department and to recognize offices and employees who have done excellent work.

Kapil Sibal, Union Minister of Science and Technology and Earth Sciences will be the Chief Guest at the function.

Interacting with the media on the eve of the occasion, Director General, Dr. Ajit Tyagi said that IMD is the National Meteorological Service of the country and the principal government agency in all matters relating to meteorology, seismology and allied subjects.

He said that from a modest beginning in 1875, IMD has progressively expanded its infrastructure for meteorological observations, communications, forecasting and weather services and it has achieved a parallel scientific growth.

IMD has recently developed technique for five-day district-wise quantitative forecast of rainfall, temperature, wind, cloud amount and humidity. This is very useful for issuing district-wise agro-meteorological advisories for the benefit of farming community of the country.

E-Atlas containing information about frequency, intensity, direction of movement of tropical cyclonic storms formed over north Indian Ocean during the period 1891-2007 has been prepared.

World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) has appreciated the timely and accurate warnings issued by IMD for very severe cyclonic storm "NARGIS"(April 28- May 3,
2008), which affected Myanmar.

Workshops have been organized at Shimla and Dehradun to assess the user''s requirement of mountainous regions.

A real time seismic monitoring system has also been established for providing information to the Tsunami Warning Centre.

IMD has taken up new initiatives for massive modernization and up gradation of equipments, computing facilities, technology, services and human resource development.

It has envisaged a dedicated meso-network to meet the requirements of Commonwealth Games 2010 and a dedicated weather channel for improving the public weather service of the Department. (ANI)