Instead of the minimum 9,000 weather stations that Nigeria needs, the country only has 54 according to the Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NiMet). The Director-General of the agency, Prof. Sani Mashi, said NiMet is struggling with challenges including capacity inadequate network stations.
He revealed that the agency does not have enough weather stations to serve the country’s large population and surface area.
“it is unfortunate that the agency is running on an extremely low density stations going by the standard of World Metrological Organization (WMO) which says a Metrological agency should have a station at every 100 miles, meaning that the country’s agency should have 9,000 stations against the 54 stations it currently has,” the DG said.
“Nigeria is supposed to have not less than 9,000 weather stations but we currently have only 54 because of technical and capacity challenges.“ He talked about the agency’s partnership with both local and foreign agencies such as Katsina State, UKMet, University of Lead, UK, to mention but a few while NIMET renders weather service to Sierra Leone, Liberia and Gambia. “What we want to do is to engage in a partnership in areas where we can discuss the possibilities of addressing what they are currently facing or they want to improve.on”
“Also, how we can help them to increase their capacity to provide this alert system that can help complement their services and also increase the market for their services,’’ he said.
MobileMet
Vanguard reported the DG disclosed that it has reached agreement with the Nigerian Communication Commission (NCC) for the allocation of a frequency for NiMet’s MobileMet service which is targeted to have 30 million daily subscribers paying NGN1 daily.
The DG said: “On MobileMet, we have approached NCC and the Commission has allocated a frequency to us and we have also discussed with MTN. We have reached necessary agreement with MTN. The law setting NIMET has empowered us to render such services. If we get about 30million subscribers on a daily basis at N1.00, it means the agency we be making N30million daily.”
2 Comments
Its unfortunate that a country as big as Nigeria Doe’s not have enough hi tech,capable synoptic weather stations that will constantly work to network the whole nation to provide daily and accurate weather report,to Nigerian populace’s,this country need at least five Doppler radars, ten thousand weather stations,a weather satellite, weather balloon s and some floating buoys that will record weather phenomena at the coast, just before the spring equinox, Nigeria comes under the influence of South west monsoon wind,these are regular south east trade wind coming from subtropical high pressure belt around 30 degree south off the coast of south Africa,wind adapt to the characteristic of their immediate environment, so after crossings the warm water over the gulf of Guinea,they became hot and wet resulting in much precipitation at the coastal and inland west Africa, rainfall is greater at the coast and decreases further inland toward the northern desert fridges. So is very important to have a sophisticated weather equipment over the Nigeria waters, in order to make accurate prediction and understand Nigeria weather phenomena,by doing so it will help to boast agriculture, water management’s industry,climate change and other negatives weather impacts, such as erosion,desertification and encroachment this will boast reliability in the agency and foster growth and development in Nigeria,buoys and ship equip weather station should be available in our waters, balloons,radar s and weather station should be available inland,a total networks or coverage of Nigeria is necessary. Enough weather data from those station means accurate weather prediction,a passionates and professional (weatherman) meteorologist should be trained,that will work day and night to give the nation a result. Africa is the least covered due to non or inadequate data from the region,most of weather forecast for some remote Africa comes from weather satellite,those prediction are not accurate most time due to insufficient data, wundermap weather underground owns by national weather service,an agency under the executives departments in US,support ownership of personal weather stations throughout the globe,this enable people throughout the globe to own a personal weather station and send their data in realtime to the agency, so they can make forecast base on the available data and then make weather prediction to the data source area, there by enhancing total global coverage,for us to succeed we must our time money and energy in what we do,and the most important thing,we must be willing and passionate about what we do. Some Nigeria youth like me are ready to tirelessly work for this nation,but we needed a support physically and financially from the governments
I have fine through what the DG NiMet said in the writeup above and as a climatologist, I feel the situation doesn’t reflect what Nigeria is in the eyes if the world. I am glad that the DG has been doing a good job to redeem the situation. I strongly advise that more places especially campus of universities, colleges of education, poly techniques can be used to cite some of the stations in order to build a fair network. This will serve in the interim.