Mani

About her namesake: Anna Mani (23 August 1918 – 16 August 2001) was an Indian physicist and meteorologist. Mani made contributions to the field of meteorological instrumentation, conducted research, and published numerous papers on solar radiation, ozone, and wind energy measurements.

Her formative years were spent engrossed in books, and by the age of eight she had read almost all the books in the Malayalam public library and, by the time she was twelve, all the books in English. On her eighth birthday, she declined to accept her family's customary gift of a set of diamond earrings, asking instead for a set of Encyclopædia Britannica. The world of books opened her to new ideas and imbued in her a deep sense of social justice which informed and shaped her life.

Mani wanted to pursue dancing, but she decided in favour of physics because she liked the subject. In 1939, she graduated from the Pachaiyappas College in Chennai (then Madras), with a B.Sc Honors degree in physics and chemistry. In 1945, she went to Imperial College, London to pursue graduate studies in physics but ended up specialising in meteorological instruments.

Mani wished to make India independent in weather instruments. She standardized the drawings of close to one hundred weather instruments. In Bangalore, she set up a small workshop that manufactured instruments to measure wind speed and solar energy and worked on developing an apparatus to measure ozone. In 1960, Mani started her work on measuring atmospheric ozone, before the world even understood the ozone layer’s functions. She designed an instrument - ozonesonde - to measure atmospheric ozone. She also set up a meteorological observatory at the Thumba rocket launching facility. For her various achievements she is referred as "Weather woman of India".