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WIMEA-ICT WDR/WIDS Training at Uganda National Meteorological Authority
The Uganda National Meteorological Authority (UNMA) invited the WIMEA-ICT Project to a one-day hands-on training on the Weather Data Repository (WDR) and Weather Information Dissemination System (WIDS) to improve staff skills in data and dissemination of weather information.
This training was carried out at UNMA on the 19th October 2017, was participated in by 20 UNMA staff, 04WIMEA-ICT researchers and 06 BSc. students from Makerere University. The Director Training and Research, Mrs. Teddy Tindimanyire in her opening remarks welcomed participants to the training whose main objective is to train weather station observers to improve their skills on understanding, sending and using data in a digitized format. She informed that this training will address the challenge on the quality and timelines of data. The training will enable observers to digitise the data at their stations and send it to the repository in Kampala, and also and also use this electronic data to make the weather and seasonal forecasts, which will reduce the time lag.
Dr. Julianne Sansa, the WIMEA-ICT Project Principal Investigator informed participants that the project started in 2013, and expressed her appreciation for the interaction with the weather observers from Arua, Mbabara, Kabale, Soroti, Masindi, Kasese, Entebbe, Tororo and Jinja. The objective of the project is have products that are of impact to the users and stakeholders. The data and dissemination challenges of the Authority are good study cases for the project, and with this hands-on training on the two systems;-WDR (which has the web, mobile and desktop version) and WIDS (the web, audio, USSD system) are open to comments for improvements, so that a more user-friendly system can be generated that will fit the Authority needs.
In conclusion, this hands-on training was a great experience to the UNMA staff participants who suggested for another extra day for training, and the WIMEA-ICT researchers who trained the staff and received feedback to make the WDR and WIDS more fit to meet the user’s needs.