The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has categorized the Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NIMET) as the best meteorological service on the continent in the recent assessment carried out by the global organization on the activities of the NIMET.
Describing the feat as a plus for the federal government, the Director-General of the NIMET, Professor Bako Mansur Matazu, attributed this to the support being given to NIMET by the Ministry of Aviation and the policy direction towards providing the service.
Equally, in order to reduce the risk of negative weather phenomenon like low-level wind shear system and other possible moving weather systems that pilots encounter especially during rainfalls, NIMET announced that it has installed weather equipment across the country’s 24 airports.
NIMET DG who described the installed equipment as very sensitive and capital intensive cited some of the equipment already installed as the Doppler radar system and Runway Visual Range (RVR) at the 24 airports specifically at the four major airports.
Matazu while declaring that NIMET also had independent weather forecast offices across the airports, said: “Some of these instruments have sensors installed in them, even at airports that have perimeter fences, we have very serious challenges of vandalization and I will give an example of this. Low-Level Wind-shear Alert System (LLWAS) has eight sensors, if more than three are down, it will not give a clear picture of the wind-shear and this is a major hazard to aircraft either landing or taking off.
“But, we came up with a model of integrating communities around in securing some of these installations and I can tell you since I came on board, I instituted a task team on airport operations and parts of the task team, we have our safety officers who now engage the neighbouring hosting communities, involving them in securing the equipment. We provide them with some incentives and welfare to communities to help us to do that.
“On the other hand, we came up with an alternative method of monitoring and forecasting these wind shear without using a sensor rather the use of Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) system. Since I came on board, we have spent a lot of money in upgrading our Numerical Weather Prediction Department with the assistance of the Weather Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and out of these, we have what is called Satellite Milecasting Facility and this male casting is giving us a diagnostic analysis any cloud over Nigeria and we believe we can detect also the possibility of the potential of any airport of being affected by wind-shear.
“So, we are complementing these two and it is giving us a very clear result. In the first phase, we are earmarking 10 airports and out of the 10 airports, three have been addressed now and we are doing the other two in the next two weeks. We intend to cover the 10 airports before the end of the year and by the first quarter of next year, we are going to address the remaining airports.”
The NIMET DG expressed the optimism that by June of 2022, “we want operations at our airports to be more than 95 per cent optimum and we are very confident that the aviation community is very happy with our performance. We have met the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO) 9001 2015. We are the first meteorological service in Africa to achieve this and because of this feat, World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) is recruiting NIMET to assist other African countries to move forward. Presently, we have the Gambia, Malawi and Mozambique.”
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