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•Reveals how agency tackles vandalism
By Chinelo Obogo, [email protected]
Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NiMet) has said that it regularly provides weather forecasts and travel advisory to domestic airlines but that the decision on whether to adopt them rests on the operators.
The director general of the agency, Prof. Mansur Matazu, who recently spoke to reporters on a range of issues including why there has been an increase in incidents due to inclement weather, said that NiMet can only give advisory but the decision to fly rests on the airlines. He also spoke on how the agency is improving its services and dealing with increasing activities of vandals.
Excerpts:
Challenges confronting NiMet
There is a lot of interest now in what we do and that is good for us as it sharpens our work and helps us do more on this and with that revenue will come, client satisfaction and sustainable development would be achieved. I just don’t believe the saying that because of dwindling revenue, we cannot perform. What we do is just to block leakages and then implement performance management system whereby you work not because you are being supervised, but because it is your work and you are happy doing it.
I can tell you that most of our staff close very late, just make them happy with regards to welfare, training, working environment, internet and all this and you can get the best from them. Even, our website was created by our staff, we didn’t pay a Kobo. We only sent them for training and we are getting the best.
Funding
I can tell you we don’t owe any contractor. The moment your job is finished, we run a transparent financial system that does a cash plan, which captures our contractors and we implement that cash plan, twice in a month and you get you paid.
I think one thing that has helped us is just sincerity of purpose. If you just have a clear-cut purpose of getting results and you have the right team, I am sure we can achieve a lot. In aviation, we have almost the least in terms of revenue, but I tell myself and my team, they all know, we are also the happiest.
Despite the small salaries and allowances that we get, we are happy. One thing that adds to our happiness is that some of our services are being received and utilised by the common man and you see that simple information is changing someone’s life. So naturally, we would be happy doing that. But we would do more with the help of our management.
Vandalism
In Port Harcourt for instance, vandals cut a whole mast from its base. In Lagos, even within the airport perimeter, we recorded vandalisation, but we were able to weather through the storm.
One reason for our success is that we are working on alternative technology called Terminal Doppler Radar. We are also devising what we call north-central approach which helps us to study cloud physics over any area in the country. With the cloud physics knowledge, you would know whether cloud could result into microburst and it is from microburst from an entire set of clouds that we could have wind shear. So, we are using multiple approaches just as they are doing in the US. We also engage in community policing and we have seen significant improvement with regards to security and also FAAN and other authorities have been involved and they are helping us a lot.
Airlines’ compliance with our advisory
When you talk about Pilot-in-Command (PIC), even Air Traffic Controllers (ATC) can’t dictate to them. They give them information and they say it is at your discretion. So part of that information is our Met information. Every 30 minutes and in real time, there is a screen at the control tower where they give them update if there is any sudden change in weather and I am sure ATCs must have warned pilot about mild wet runway because even before take-off, we have the pilot briefing room, where you get our folder and that is why we are beginning to publish those airlines that collect our folders. So the issue is compliance but pilots have the final say.
On the recent incident involving Untied Nigeria, they cannot say we didn’t report that we would have rain. We reported rain with the intensity and I am sure the ATCs must have said ‘watch out for wet runway’ and there are procedures for wet runway landing and if you don’t apply that, it’s your decision.
Lagos Airport is one of our flashpoints and so you get the best of our staff and the best of our equipment. As you know almost more than 70 per cent of our flights happen in Lagos and so you don’t expect anything below standard in terms of our services in Lagos.
Inadequate technical personnel
Some of our members of staff usually get poached, not internally, but by international organisations. But you know something, we don’t see it as a major challenge because we have thousands of qualified Nigerians that can replace them because we imbibe the culture of mentoring.
One thing that we suffer is because some of our recruitments happen in syndicate. If 30, 40 people come at the same time that means they would go at the same time. So, under natural attrition, during retirement, you would see about 36 people retiring, but one thing that is helping us in NiMet is that some of the things that could be done by 10 people ab initio could be done using technology by two persons. So, it is not much of a major problem. If a NiMet staff got poached by WMO, we feel happy for him as a person and we feel also happy as a country because we should also consider people sending forex home as an input to our economy.
Our services
We provide technical services which we call WMO VCP (Voluntary Country Partnership), which in ICAO is called “No Country Left Behind.” Weather is dynamic and it moves from one area to the other. Even if you have the capability and you don’t share that expertise to your neighbours, I don’t think you are helping the industry. The reason America and other countries are called superpowers is the way they are providing some of these support. For you to be relevant, you have to provide some support to the weaker communities and with that we have achieved a lot as a country. We have been categorised as the best Met service provider and they always refer to us if there is any challenge.
So we have started that Volume Coverage Pattern (VCP) with World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) at no cost, but if I tell you, that at the VCP meeting that we attended, Nigeria was the only black nation because you have US, UK, Spain, Netherlands, eight of them plus Nigeria because we want to show the world that we are not a beggar nation in all ramifications, even in the science of weather and services, we are not waiting for any country.
We just had a meeting with the French Government, and we are going to do a programme with them and they were very happy with what they have seen. This provides credibility, trust and relevance and with that you would get recognised by the global community and they suggested Nigeria will help these countries under a United Nations financed Systematic Observation Financing Facility (SOFF).
The essence of this SOFF is based on the UN Secretary General’s statement that in the next five years, all citizens in the world must have access to early warning. You have seen what happened in Libya; 10,000 people unaccounted for and more than 6,000 people confirmed dead in one incident. It has been confirmed globally that if people get early warning on any imminent weather hazard, you are bound to reduce casualties by more than 70 percent. But if they get the information one week ahead, it will increase.
Schools
We have two schools – the WMO Regional Training Centre in Lagos and the Muhammadu Buhari Meteorological Institute of Science and Technology in Katsina. The one in Lagos is offering WMO classes certificates of class one, two and class three equivalent of Diploma, HND and Postgraduate Diploma and the one in Katsina is accredited by the NBTE, offering Diploma in Meteorology and Diploma in Climate Change. We are working with NBTE to get accreditation for HND since we have graduated the first set. All the English speaking West African countries and all NiMet staff that you have seen across the country are products of the Regional Training Centre in Lagos, all the Directors of Met Services in English
Multi-Language introduction
If you don’t digest to the level of the understanding of the users, it has no value. So you can do all the science, you can spend all the resources, you can do all the analysis but if the users don’t understand, it makes no sense. As a result of this, we engage in a lot of partnerships and under these we were able to see the demands for co-production. Before we even do the forecast, we invite stakeholders, they give us their experience of the previous year’s forecast and we also want to know how they need the forecast, in what form and frequencies and that was what informed our translation to three languages.
This year we were able to downscale to 28 states and we want to cover the whole country with the help of the state governors. We have addressed the Nigerian Governors’ Forum more than three times. We were invited by the National Economic Council and we want to sign an MoU with some countries.
The feelers we are getting from the users are very positive and these are some of the things that encourage us, a simple information, that changes the lives of people. For instance, just tell a farmer from the beginning and end of the season what is likely to happen, the time to plant and the amount of rainfall, and with that he would know the variety to go for. We tell them what to do from land clearing to harvesting with regards to weather and we even give them yield forecast.
We are at the receiving end of most of these rivers and we are located at the downstream and the downstream location of the river is the most dangerous zone because that is where the accumulation happens. Our flood is based on whether release of water from the dam in neighbouring countries or from within. We have made a lot of efforts in our engagement with the dams authorities in Nigeria and they have all our forecast and based on that they begin to release the water gradually.
Earthquake, flooding
Earthquake is a geophysical phenomenon and is not influenced by atmospheric process. Climate change and global warming are just like malaria and signs of malaria. We are lucky Nigeria has not had earthquakes. Secondly, because of our system in Nigeria, we don’t expect such high level intensity of activities as we have seen in countries like Libya. Libya used to be a dry area, at times they experienced only 25 millimeters of rain that can fall in two hours in Abuja. That is what Libya would experience in a year. The increasing temperature, condensate activities and the possibility of having high intensity storms over Europe, was as a result of passage of a bigger storm over the continent that created a very long pressure over the Sahara Desert and with high energy because of the solar radiation in it coupled with dust in the atmosphere, developed into a very severe system that impounded the Sahara, such that an area that had been dry for several decades, now experienced flooding.
We don’t expect much of that intensity in Nigeria, but definitely there are evidences of climate change in the country but in our case we are being influenced by high intensity rain that results into flash flood within cities and villages and riverine communities as a result of prolonged rain and also inflow of water from neighbouring countries as a result of opening of dams.
