REALITY OF CLIMATE CHANGE IS HERE WITH US- NiMet DG
Maryam Aminu/ Oru Leonard
The Director-General Nigeria Metrological Agency (NiMet), Professor Mansur Bako Matazu has said that reality of climate change is evidently here with us.
He stated this at a workshop jointly organised by NiMet and the Federal University of Technology Akure, under the auspices of the Global Challenge Research Fund African Science for Weather Information and Forecasting Techniques (SWIFT).
In the workshop which has it’s theme as ‘Evaluation and Improvement of 0-6Hour and Short-Term Forcasts With Users for Better Decision Making”, Professor Mansur noted that extreme and high impact weather events areincreasing in intensity and frequencies.
Weather events such as squally thunderstorms, droughts and floods have severe impacts on African communities.
He noted that every year high-intensity weather events results in devastating losses of life and damages to land, property and infrastructure, such as the one witnessed recently in Nigeria caused by floods.
” Every effort at predicting and improving the accuracy of weather forecast is therefore critical and necessary for people’s safety
and Improvements in all weather sensitive social economic sectors
including aviation,agriculture energy,
water resources,marine,maritime
and emergency response”, he stated.
He said the Agency has continued to invest in improving delivery of services and generation of relevant products and the NWP unit has also received a boost in infrastructure that will enhance
their ability to make adequate timely and accurate numerical weather predictions that will service not only Nigerians but also other countries on the continent.
“We are also at advanced stage of revamping our marine metrological operations to deliver world-class services that are globally relevant in line with international best practices”, he revealed.
He said one of the strengths of NiMet is that the agency has constantly engaged in collaborative partnership that will improve their service delivery and wider reach to the last mile. Among such is GCRF African Swift Project.
He stated that SWIFT projects has offered an opportunity for Africa meteorologists, scientist and researchers to come together to share knowledge and develop improved forecasting techniques that aims to deliver a step-change in Africa weather forecasting capability and communication from hourly to seasonal timescales to protect the lives and livelihoods of African people while improving the economies of their countries.
Prof Mansur further stated that the issue of climate change calls for concern though Nimet has taken advantage of the emerging technological advancement to deliver tailor made climate information. However there is a strong call for attention in the area of re-balancing the ownership and responsibility for climate services from provider-led and user informed to practices of co exploration,co-design, co-development where providers and users of weather and climate services have one voice.
Speaking with journalists after the event the DG said that the Nigerian meteorological agency wish to expand their services to non-aviation sectors. A lot of such critical sector is the Marine sector.
“Nigerian is having more than 800 km coast, busy sea around us with a lot of shipping activities.As part of our establishment act we are mandated to provide marine forecast for ocean and we need to do a lot of installation especially on high sensitive instruments in order to monitor the prevailing weather conditions around the coast as well as the sea state. Though it is capital intensive but by next year we are going to expand because we are getting support from the federal ministry of aviation climate change is helping to induce and increased intensity rate and magnitude of this high impact or extreme events. taking Katsina state for example that witnessed over 100 mm of rain which has never happened for the last hundred years this extreme events is being triven by climate change”, the DG concluded.
