Mozambique expands pilot weather program to protect residents and create new sources of weather data
Earth Networks today announced that it entered into a partnership with Instituto Nacional de Meteorologia de Moçambique (INAM) to scale up live storm monitoring, lightning detection and real-time observations that will power life-saving weather forecasting and alerting services across the country. The announcement was made today at a launch presentation in Maputo in collaboration with INAM, the Ministry of Transport and Communications, and the U.S. Commercial Service.
Initiated as a pilot project in 2014, the Earth Networks Weather Network in Mozambique is intended to help safety and disaster recovery agencies provide the public with advance warning of incoming severe weather to save lives, reduce injuries and minimize property damage. In addition to lightning detection, the network includes automated weather stations and real-time observations for hourly point forecasts across Mozambique. With its tropical climate, Mozambique is subject to a long rainy season from November to April and has already suffered life and property losses this year due to dangerous storms and damaging floods. In 2017 the network detected more than 9.6 million in-cloud and cloud-to-ground lightning strikes in the country.
Earth Networks has a well-established presence in more than 25 Sub-Saharan African countries through a variety of pilot and donor-funded programs as well as private sector partnerships. These initiatives help national meteorological and hydrological services (NMHS) increase capacity in a sustainable manner while providing improved safety and operational efficiency for companies, organizations, and communities. The INAM – Earth Networks partnership helps residents and visitors gain access to more detailed weather information such as localized forecasts and real-time severe weather alerts.
“We are excited to be in Maputo today with INAM to showcase these new capabilities to safety agencies and demonstrate opportunities to use new weather data sets and software services to optimize operations within a wide variety of industries including agriculture, mining and utilities,” said Ari Davidov, Director of International Business Development at Earth Networks. “This truly is the realization of a multi-stakeholder, multi-user weather information platform for the country that is designed to sustain itself on a long-term basis.”
“Alerting the public to incoming severe weather has always been a challenge due to the size of the country and Mozambique’s volatile climate,” said Dr. Aderito Celso Felix Aramuge, General Director of Instituto Nacional de Meteorologia de Moçambique (INAM). “Working with Earth Networks to implement this life-saving early warning system will enable us to issue warnings for dangerous thunderstorms, strong winds and storm surges with extended lead times and detailed location-based alerts.”
Operating in 90+ countries, the Earth Networks Weather Network consists of more than 10,000 stations that are exclusive to Earth Networks and update with live data every two seconds, providing pinpoint accurate localized forecasts from 0 to 15 days with ENcast. The Earth Networks Total Lightning Network is the most extensive and technologically advanced lightning network in the world. Its ability to monitor in-cloud lightning, in addition to cloud-to-ground lightning enables faster localized storm alerts so forecasters can warn of other forms of severe weather such as downbursts, heavy rains, hail and high winds.
Source: BusinessWire
