Three days after the Earth Science Minister dismissed the maximum temperature of 52.9 Degree Celsius recorded at an automatic weather station (AWS) in Delhi as “unlikely”, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) stepped in on Saturday, acknowledging that the sensor was reporting about three degrees Celsius higher.
IMD said an AWS’s temperature reading of 52.9 Degrees Celsius at Mungeshpur in northwest Delhi was due to a malfunctioning sensor, and such devices will be examined.
As announced by Minister Kiren Rijiju, the weather office had dispatched a team of experts to Mungeshpur to examine the device for errors after the record maximum temperature attracted media attention across the world.
“The temperature sensor of AWS Mungeshpur is found to report about three degrees Celsius higher maximum temperature than the maximum temperature reported by the standard instrument,” IMD said and attributed the readings to malfunctioning of the sensor of the AWS.
“We will examine AWS, course corrections, if any, will be carried out on an individual basis,” IMD’s Director General Mrutyunjay Mohapatra said. The faulty sensor of the Mungeshpur AWS would be replaced in a few days, he added.
Rijiju shared a draft report on the Mungeshpur incident on social media, which said the maximum temperature recorded by the AWS was three degrees higher than the standard instruments. The report recommended that the surface instrument division at IMD Pune examine and calibrate the AWS temperature sensors at periodic intervals of all the AWS.
It further suggested that a Factory Acceptance Test should be carried out in different temperatures before the installation of an AWS and called for planned routine maintenance of such devices installed across the country.
The IMD had already said that the AWS reading at Mungeshpur was an outlier compared to the temperature measured by other AWS and manual observatories in Delhi.
On May 31, the IMD said that a faulty sensor had led to higher temperature readings at the AWS installed by the Panjabrao Deshmukh Krishi Vidyapeeth in Nagpur, as a media report suggested it had reached 56 Degrees Celsius.