GIZ PrAda Madagascar Training

TAHMO is working together with the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) and the national meteorological service (DGM) under the PrAda project. This project’s key objective is to improve the agrometeorological and climate information focused on three regions within Madagascar.

TAHMO has been selected to advise and support on improving DGM’s internal data flow and their technical capacities to effectively manage transmission, storage, and backup of their meteorological data. 

The meteorological services in African countries often face quite a large variation in brands and types for their (agro)meteorological stations. New stations get installed through various projects but there’s often a lack of data integration and station maintenance, especially once projects have ended. 

Within the DGM they have five different brands of AWS (Automatic Weather Stations) besides their manually operated synoptic stations. There’re also external organizations that are managing their own weather stations, of which at least eight were identified.

Getting all this data organized and integrated into a centralized data system is posing some huge challenges. Within this project, we’ve chosen to integrate the data into Climsoft, since this doesn’t require any specialized hardware and requires a widely available skill level to operate, in contrast to other climate data management systems.

A kickoff mission was done in February 2020 at the start of this project. Since then, most of the work needed to be done remotely, relying on virtual meetings due to travel restrictions related to COVID-19. Despite these setbacks, the project has shown good progress, with currently around 75% of the DGM’s automatic weather stations integrated. In the next months of the project, we’ll focus on a data portal built on top of Climsoft, and a mobile application to report observations from the manual synoptic stations will be integrated.