NATIONAL MET SERVICES


Residents walk through a street flooded by rain in Fass Mbao, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Dakar, Senegal.


Residents walk through a street flooded by rain in Fass Mbao, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Dakar, Senegal.
WMO, with 188 member countries and territories, helps national meteorological (met) services, especially those in developing countries, contribute to their countries’ development plans and become full partners in global collaborations. Nearly all countries have national met services that provide weather observations, forecasts and services for their own citizens and, through WMO, contribute to global observations, forecasts and climate information.
Most African met services struggle with a lack of funding, climate expertise and equipment for weather observations such as ground-level weather stations ― the critical basis for efficiently delivering weather information. WMO estimates that Africa should have 10,000 weather stations but has only 744, less than a quarter of which provide observations that meet WMO requirements. This creates a large weather “data gap” in Africa.
“These weather services range from a country like Liberia that might have two people with very limited training,” Leduc Clarke said, “but they’re still getting out there and making those consistent weather observations, to countries like South Africa, Morocco and Kenya that have larger operations but are still dealing with very significant observation gaps.”
Many of Africa’s met services are monitoring weather primarily for aviation purposes and translate the information into a format useful for agriculture.
“With growing concern about climate change, a lot of the governments in Africa are recognizing that meteorology services have a lot more importance than just servicing the aviation industry,” Mason said.
“What’s starting to be recognized now,” he added, “is that if more investment is put into the meteorological services, they could provide valuable information.