MIMOZA (2017-2022)

MIMOZA - the full project name beeing “Implementation of an Early Warning System (EWS) to mitigate high impact weather events for Mozambique”. The MET Norway part in this project is to contribute to INAM strengthen the early warning systems and climate services.
In the Mimoza project MET Norway collaborates with UK Met Office (UK) Deltares (Netherlands), Consultec (Mozambique) and Instituto Nacional de Meteorologia (INAM) to support increased quality of weather and climate services. The project was finansed by the Nordic Development Fund and ended June 2022. MET Norway used in-house developed open-source tools to visualise meteorological data. It is free to use for everyone and accessible by GITHub. The main tool for meteorologists, Diana, displays model data, satellite pictures, radar pictures, ground observations on a map. Tseries displays time series of weather data for a specific location. Diana has different modules allowing meteorologists to add information like cyclone tracks. Diana can produce pictures and animations of the development of weather features like low pressure systems, temperature, rainfall and more. The can be used on TV presentations, social media, news channels aso.
One of MET Norways tasks in this projects was to train meteorologists at INAM to use Diana. Colleagues from Maputo, Inhambane, Nampula and Zambezia.

Strengthening of the Early Warning System (EWS)

The main tasks are to assist Instituto Nacional de Meteorologia (INAM) in developing decision support tools, like meteorological visualisation, monitoring and production tools for strengthening the EWS and Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR). Implementation of available open source software Diana and Tseries will be a part of this activity.
Another task related to weather forecasts and warnings is to facilitate the process for INAM to establish and operate a service delivery platform and advise on how to communicate and issue forecasts and warnings to the public. There is also a need to establish a system for forecast verification. This project will provide training in techniques using available observational data so that the forecasters are able to identify and assess NWP performance The project aims to build a strong forecasting expert team at INAM. These meteorologists can act as coaches or mentors for their colleagues, and especially for new employees, in order to help INAM become self-sufficient in terms of forecasting skills. The main goal is to make INAM visible for the public and other stakeholders in Mozambique.

Workshop INAM

Strengthening of the INAM Climate Services

For INAM to build climate services will involve trend-analysis, gridding, extreme value analysis, return values, and risk estimation. A starting point for this work is to install and do training in the use of R/R-studio. Through working with data the familiarization with R will evolve. Next step is training in the use of open-source R-based tool ‘esd’ – Empirical Statistical Downscaling  to work with the data. Work with downscaling will be associated with CORDEX.
Climate activities include advising and supporting INAM (Mozambique) in coordinating the CORDEX FPS. In addition, we try to raise the level of climate research through collaboration and building collegial networks. Our partners at INAM are now involved in planning a joint workshop with CORDEX-Africa and we have joint presentations of the project at European Geosciences Union (EGU). In addition, we have training in R, and together, this builds on the capacity to scale down global climate models for Mozambique / Africa and scientific publication - which is part of MIMOZA's goal. We also use our cooperation in discussing how the data is used, and place great emphasis on using the best available climate information in the right way to support climate adaptation work.
An activity within CORDEX, CORDEX-ESD was to arrange for a number of workshops. In April 2022, a workshop was conducted in Johannesburg (joint CORDEX-Africa and CORDEX FPS southeast Africa).