TAHMO country representative for Kenya Victor Omoit joined Faith Wawira – Senior ICT Officer (WRA) and Joseph Mukola – Principal Meteorology Technician (KMD) on a five-day field work to carry out regular maintenance on 10 Automatic Weather Stations installed in the Nzoia basin.
The team started their work in the Eldoret sub-region then in the Kitale Sub-region and finally complete their activity in Kakamega.
The stations involved were at the following locations: Ndalat, Naiberi, Turbo NYS, Chebororwa ATC, Kapcherop, Mt Elgon Flowers, Koitobos, Ndalu, Malava, Nzoia Sugar Company and finally Butere Girls High School.
Early warning Systems could contribute up to 36:1 in terms of benefit-cost ratios in developing countries. However, they are often non-functional mostly due to a lack of weather and stream-flow data (WMO-No.1153). This is the challenge that TAHMO is addressing with a dense network of ground observing stations that provide near real-time reliable data to improve Numerical Weather Predictions (NWP) and hydrological models for Africa through data assimilation (satellites and in-situ data). https://tahmo.org/climate-data/
Whatever solution is provided for an Early Warning System should be easily scalable, sustainable and impactful. It needs to be a complete end-to-end solution that involves data collection, processing and dissemination of “localized” information to end users and the use of the information in their activities in the form of warnings to build their resilience through disaster preparedness and flood risk reduction. This is the basis for which the Water Resources Authority (WRA) installed an Early Warning System consisting of 10 Automatic Weather Stations and 7 Automatic Water Level Stations in 2018/2019 and TAHMO is very happy to have been part of this project.
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