Status and Background Information

This week the the Memorandum of Agreement (MoU) is under review by the GZU.

Some HESCF stickers are ordered and will be sent to the GZU together with the EUMETSAT Key Unit as soon as they arrive.

Some more background to our small project:

According to our current knowledge, there are five EUMETCast stations installed in Zimbabwe. Four stations are installed within Departments of Ministries and Governmental bodies and one within a university. All five are situated in Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe.

There is one station in:

1. The Environmental Management Agency (EMA) within the Ministry of Environment in charge of Fire Monitoring (www.ema.co.zw);
2. The Scientific and Industrial Research and Development Centre (SIRDC) in charge of Drought Monitoring (www.sirdc.ac.zw);
3. The Ministry of Agriculture (MoA) in charge of Agricultural Monitoring (www.moa.gov.zw);
4. The MSD (Meteorological Service Department) of Zimbabwe within the Ministry of Environment, Water and Climate in charge of weather forecasting (www.weather.co.zw/);
5. The University of Zimbabwe (UZ). UZ was selected as one of the 3 Regional Capacity Building partners in the AMESD and MESA SADC-THEMA project, in charge of developing training material on the SADC-THEMA's for drought and floods for the full Southern African Region.  UZ also intensively use the EUMETCast station internally for educational and research purposes. They have multiple GIS labo's able to accommodate 100+ students in parallel... all fed with data from EUMETCast.

The station which is the goal of our project at the GZU in Masvingo  will be the first EUMETCast station, which will be installed outside the capital. It will give the students and professors the possibility to base their studies and education on actual and complete data sets. Due to the lack of a reliable and fast internet infrastructure the download of meteorological data is very time consuming and only small data sets of outdated data can currently be obtained. With this station the quality of education and research will be increased.