The Minister of Telecommunications, Information Technologies and Social Communication, Mário Augusto Oliveira, said this Friday, 18th, in the city of Lubango, Huíla province, that the government has been investing, since 2018, around 60 million euros in improvement and modernization of meteorological systems in Angola.
The aim, according to the minister, is to allow meteorological services to support air and land transport, as well as the agricultural sector.
Mário Oliveira was speaking to the press at the end of the inauguration ceremony of the automated station for measuring meteorological parameters at altitude called “ROBOTSONDA”, at Mukanka International Airport, in the city of Lubango.
According to the minister, this is a nationwide project covering eight certified national airports, with emphasis on the cities of Lubango (Huíla), Luanda, Luena (Moxico), Huambo, Cabinda and Ondjiva (Cunene).
Mário Oliveira stated that the program is developed in partnership with Meteo France Internacional (MFI) and includes 76 meteorological stations.
According to Mário Oliveira, the implementation of the stations ensures a more realistic weather forecast in Angola, enabling the planning and safety of maritime, land and air transport, as well as aid in sustainable agricultural activities and the projection of construction of housing infrastructure , industrial, road and others.
Huíla, he informed, benefited from seven meteorological stations, one of them aeronautical, one synoptic, three agro-meteorological, one seismic and another automated for measuring meteorological parameters at altitude.
“The seismic station, in the Mapunda neighborhood, will provide us with earthquake information, it has a radius of 300 to 350 kilometers of coverage and the installation of another system is planned. It is an integrated project that includes several stations”, he continued.
He referred that the data from the project’s survey feed the world meteorological organization network and allow Angola to contribute on a large scale to the correction of global meteorological models.
According to the minister, these data are also assimilated by INAMET’s regional meteorological models, which will allow Angolans, through meteorological forecasts, to have accurate and better warnings in cases of severe meteorological events such as intense rains or droughts.
He made it known that at the level of the supervising ministry and using satellite technology, they have been developing a project to study the soil, the existence or not of groundwater flows to help fight in the southern provinces of Angola.
Mário Oliveira acknowledged the effort of everyone involved in the development of the project to improve meteorological systems in Angola, stressing that its budget has a strong training component and today it has internationally certified technicians in terms of meteorology, with regard to the project of satellites.
In turn, the governor of Huíla, Nuno Mahapi, said that the stations will not only benefit the province, but the country, an investment by the supervising ministry to provide more reliable information and thus provide true statistics on meteorology.
“Our focus is to have an integrated country in development and this work is a good initiative and we will always support it”, he added.
The automated station for measuring meteorological parameters at altitude, complete a network that totals three ROBOTSONDAS in Angola, one of which is already operational at 4 de Fevereiro airport and the other installed at Comandante Dangereux airport in Luena, with an opening scheduled for the end of the month ongoing.
Regarding the African continent, with the exception of Angola, all other countries operate this task in a conventional way.
With ANGOP
