Indian physicist, as well as meteorologist Anna Mani, was born on August 23, 1918, and she passed away on August 16, 2001. She served as a visiting professor at the Raman Research Institute while also retiring as the Deputy Director General of the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD). Anna Mani conducted research, produced a number of papers, and made contributions to the field of meteorological instrumentation in the areas of solar radiation, ozone, as well as wind energy metrics.
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About Anna Mani
Early Life
A family of Syrian Christians gave birth to Anna Modayil Mani in 1918 at Peermade, then Travancore, now Kerala, India. Her father was an atheist and a civil engineer. She was an avid reader and the seventh of her family’s eight children. She started wearing only khadi clothing after being inspired by Gandhi’s nationalist movement and impressed by him during the Vaikom Satyagraha. Anna Mani spent her early years immersed in books, and by the time she was eight years old, she had read almost all of the Malayalam-language books available at her local library. She turned down her family’s traditional diamond earring gift for her eighth birthday and requested a set of Encyclopedia Britannica instead. Her life was influenced and shaped by the book world, which introduced her to new concepts and instilled in her a strong sense of social justice.
Education
Mani wanted to specialize in dancing, but she chose physics because she found the subject to be interesting. She earned a B.Sc. with honours in physics and chemistry from the Pachaiyappas College in Chennai (then Madras) in 1939. She was awarded a research scholarship in 1940 from the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. She enrolled in graduate physics courses at Imperial College, London, in 1945 with the intention of specialising in meteorological instruments.
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Career
Mani studied the optical characteristics of diamond and ruby while working for Prof. C V Raman after earning his degree from Pachai College. She wrote five research papers and turned in her dissertation for a Ph.D., but she was denied a degree because she didn’t hold a master’s in physics. She joined the meteorology department in Pune after moving back to India in 1948, where she published a plethora of studies on meteorological instrumentation. Mani was in charge of organising the importation of British meteorological equipment. She had taken charge of a division of 121 men by 1953. Mani wanted to give India weather instrument independence. She standardised almost one hundred weather instruments’ drawings. She established a network of stations in 1957 and 1958 to measure solar radiation.
She established a small workshop in Bangalore where she produced tools for measuring solar energy and wind speed in addition to working on a tool for measuring ozone. Membership in the International Ozone Association was granted to Mani. At the Thumba rocket launch site, she erected an instrumentation tower and a meteorological observatory. She was a member of numerous scientific associations, including the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the Indian National Science Academy, the American Meteorological Society, the International Solar Energy Society, and the International Association for Meteorology and Atmospheric Physics. Mani was awarded the INSA K. R. Ramanathan Medal in 1987. In 1969, Mani was appointed Deputy Director General and relocated to Delhi. She worked in Egypt as a WMO consultant in 1975. In 1976, she left her position as the Indian Meteorological Department’s deputy director general. Mani experienced a stroke in 1994. A week before turning 83, she passed away in Thiruvananthapuram on August 16, 2001.
Books Written by Anna Mani
- 1980:- The Handbook for Solar Radiation data for India
- 1981:- Solar Radiation over India
- 1992:- Wind Energy Resource Survey in India
Frequently Asked Questions about Anna Mani:
What did Anna Mani invent?
What is Anna Mani most famous for?
What is ozonesonde?
Which Indian physicist and meteorologist is known as the weather woman of India?
Is scientist a profession?
What is a radiosonde?
Is meteorology a science?
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