Meteorologists Training ongoing in India as part of the India-UN Development Partnership Fund

July 11, 2018

Roorkee, India – 16 participants from seven Pacific Islands Developing States attended the International Specialised Training Course on Hydrology, Water Resources Management and Climate Change for Pacific Island Countries, on 25 June-20 July 2018, organised by the National Institute of Hydrology (NIH) in Roorkee, Uttarakhand, India. The course is tailor-made for the participants from Federated States of Micronesia, Republic of Marshall Islands, Tonga, Cook Islands, Nauru, Kiribati and Solomon Islands who arrived at Roorkhee, via Delhi.

This training is part of the “Climate Early Warning Systems in seven Pacific Island Countries” project, funded by the India-UN Development Partnership Fund, which seeks to strengthen the technical capacities of national meteorological and hydrological services and mitigate the impacts of climate change in these countries that are highly valuable to natural disasters.

The training includes lectures, objective exams and viva voces in Observational Systems and Instrumentation; Various Branches of Meteorology; Numerical Weather Prediction; Disaster Risk Reduction and Management; Meteorological Telecommunication and Information Technology; Climatology and Statistics; Service Delivery; Environment Monitoring and Seismology.

Through regional collaboration with the Secretariat of the Pacific Community; salinity meters will be installed in Tarwa, the most populous atoll in Kiribati to help management of fresh water lenses. With this technology, public utility officials will be able to test the salinity levels in ground water before it is pumped out to support water distribution in Tarawa.

Two practical trainings are being provided, one each in 1) Dynamic, Numeral Weather Prediction and Physical Meteorology and 2) Synoptic, Satellite and Radar Meteorology. This is timed towards the end of the course so that the meteorologists can effectively use the automated weather stations, provided as part of the project, to measure variations in precipitation, wind speed, temperature, humidity and atmospheric pressure to increase preparedness against natural hazards.

This training is part of the project that facilitates national contributions under the Paris Climate Agreement and advances international priorities outlined in the Sendai Disaster Risk Reduction, the Framework for Resilient Development in the Pacific (FRDP), and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.