Early life and education
P. R. Pisharoty was born on February 10, 1909 in the town of Kollengode in the Indian state of Kerala.His parents were Sivaramakrishnan alias Gopala Vadhyar and Lakshmi Pisharassiar. He had two brothers: Balakrishnan and Rajagopal, and three half brothers: Vaidyanathan, Rose Vadhyar and Gopalakrishnan. He completed his early education in Kerala. Having done his Physics BA honours from St. Joseph's College, Trichinopoly, Madras state, he went on to do his MA (Physics) from Madras University. He then worked as a college lecturer in Physics at Loyola College at Chennai during 1932-1941. During the summer vacations he used to work under Prof. C. V. Raman at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. On the recommendation of Raman, Pisharoty joined the India Meteorological Department in 1942, where he carried out research on thunderstorms, western disturbances, movement of monsoon depressions, orographic rain, etc. He then joined the University of California for further studies where he worked under meteorologist Jacob Bjerknes. His published two reports titled Some aspects of geostrophic poleward sensible heat and The kinetic energy of the atmosphere. He obtained his MS (in Meteorology) and PhD degrees by 1954.
Work in Indian remote sensing programme
On returning to India, Pisharoty became the Director of Colaba and Alibag Magnetic Observatories in 1959 and Founder Director of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology,Pune in 1962. In 1967 he retired as Director of the Institute of Tropical Meteorology and joined the Physical Research Laboratory, Ahmedabad as a senior professor at the invitation of Vikram Sarabhai. At this point he was entrusted with the job of introducing remote sensing technology to India. He accepted the job. His pioneering experiment of detection of coconut wilt-root disease using Soviet aircraft and US equipment was considered to be the first success in remote sensing in India.
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