India Meteorological Department  The India Meteorological Department (IMD) is an agency of the Ministry of Earth Sciences of the Government of India. It is the principal agency responsible for meteorological observations, weather forecasting and seismology. IMD is headquartered in Delhi and operates hundreds of observation stations across India and Antarctica. Regional offices are at Mumbai, Kolkata, Nagpur and Pune. IMD is also one of the six Regional Specialised Meteorological Centres of the World Meteorological Organization. It has the responsibility for forecasting, naming and distribution of warnings for tropical cyclones in the Northern Indian Ocean region, including the Malacca Straits, the Bay of Bengal, the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf. In 1686, Edmond Halley published his treatise on the Indian summer monsoon, which he attributed to a seasonal reversal of winds due to the differential heating of the Asian land mass and the Indian Ocean. The first meteorological observatories were established in India by the British East India Company. These included the Calcutta Observatory in 1785, the Madras Observatory in 1796 and the Colaba Observatory in 1826. Several other observatories were established in India during the first half of the 19th century by various provincial governments. The Asiatic Society, founding in Calcutta in 1784 and in Bombay in 1804, promoted the study of meteorology in India. Henry Piddington published almost 40 papers dealing with tropical storms from Calcutta between 1835 and 1855 in "The Journal of the Asiatic Society". He also coined the term "cyclone", meaning the coil of a snake. In 1842, he published his landmark thesis, "Laws of the Storms". After a tropical cyclone hit Calcutta in 1864, and the subsequent famines in 1866 and 1871 due to the failure of the monsoons, it was decided to organise the collection and analysis of meteorological observations under one roof. As a result, the India Meteorology Department was established in 1875. Henry Francis Blanford was appointed the first Meteorological Reporter of the IMD. In May 1889, Sir John Eliot was appointed the first "Director General of Observatories" in the erstwhile capital, Calcutta. The IMD headquarters were later shifted to Shimla in 1905, then to Pune in 1928 and finally to New Delhi in 1944. IMD became a member of the World Meteorological Organization after independence on 27 April 1949. The agency has gained in prominence due to the significance of the monsoon rains on Indian agriculture.