Mozambique is located on the coast of Southeastern Africa, bordering Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Eswatini. The country has a 2,500 kilometers long coastline towards the Indian Ocean and faces Madagascar to the east. About two-thirds of its population of more than 31 million people (2020) live and work in rural areas. In the rainy season from October to April there is regular flooding in areas near rivers. The damages to infrastructure can be large. In the period December to March, Mozambique is also affected by cyclones. The central and northern provinces are most vulnerable. The cyclone Idaí in 2019 led to extensive destruction in the provinces of Sofala and Cabo Delgado.
Mozambique, the Norwegian Meteorological Institute is collaborating with Instituto Nacional de Meteorologia (INAM) to increase the quality of weather and climate services. The project is named Sarepta, with the full name "Institutional Support and Capacity Building for Weather and Climate Services". This project started in 2023 and is financed by Norad.
Sarepta Mozambique builds on a former project, MIMOZA.
MET Norway has a in-house developed visualization tool for meteorological data, Diana (Digital Analysis). This tool is open source and can be used free of charge by anyone. Diana has modules that allow meteorologists to enter information in the map as text or symbols, so that cyclone trajectories can be drawn and show the most probable area in which the cyclone will move into. From Diana we can also make pictures and animations of the weather 1-10 days ahead in time that can be shown on social media and TV.
One of the activities in the project is to train meteorologists in Mozambique in the use of Diana. Our colleagues from Maputo, Inhambane, Nampula and Zambezia have participated in the training.
Another task is to teach researchers and meteorologists at INAM to use the statistics tool R. This is also available on the Internet with open source code. The idea is that INAM can check the weather forecast models and discover differences between the models, seasonal variations and trends in the weather forecast.
Map of Mosambique
INAM offices, Maputo
