CHENNAI: Dr B Amudha has been appointed as the new head of the Regional Meteorological Centre, Chennai.

She will be taking the place of Dr S Balachandran, who has retired from his service from Friday.

Dr Amudha, who has 33 years of experience in IMD and works as a scientist in the Instrument units and Training section at RMC.

A few works that have been noted are operational aviation weather forecasting and instrumentation, hydrology and research on northeast monsoon and cyclonic storms, and surface observational instrumentation and automatic weather stations in the weather department.

Balachandran who has been director of the Cyclone Warning Research Centre at RMC took over as the head after the retirement of SR Ramanan popularly known as rain man in 2016.

He has launched a mobile application- Public observatory for the public participation in 2021, where they can upload the current weather conditions.

It has helped the weather department to create a database ever since.

It is noteworthy that there have been various developments in the weather forecast during his tenure; the department was able to forecast weather conditions every three hours.

It has been helpful for the government departments to work accordingly during the monsoon seasons.