New Climate Early Warning System Aims to Plug Weather Blind Spots Around the World

Officials of the WMO, a branch of the U.N., said the need for early-warning systems is driven in part by weather events made more severe by human-induced climate change.

Many weather agencies in the nations targeted by the program have only a handful of technicians and limited equipment to measure temperature, wind, rainfall and barometric pressure—data used in computer models that predict hurricanes in the Caribbean or droughts in Africa, for example.

“We have billions of dollars of satellites flying around, but that’s not sufficient,” Mr. Repnik said. “We have huge dark spots in terms of data coverage. In some parts of Africa you don’t know if there’s going to be more rain or less rain because we don’t have enough data.”

At last year’s climate summit in Glasgow, WMO officials introduced a framework for a new climate early-warning system that would fill these gaps. At the COP27 meeting now under way in Sharm El Sheikh, nine donor countries and the Nordic Development Fund pledged $50 million to launch the program. By 2027, U.N. officials aim to raise $3.1 billion to complete the effort to ensure that every country has a robust early-warning system.

An investment of $800 million on climate early-warning systems in developing countries would prevent losses of $3 billion to $16 billion a year, according to a 2019 report by the U.N.’s Global Commission on Adaptation.

The U.N. program would increase the number and quality of weather stations in 26 less-developed and island nations. The Biden administration has promised $13.6 million to the program to train weather forecasters and data analysts in these nations, and to improve their weather forecasting capabilities.

In a similar effort, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is providing $15 million for Africa and another $15 million for the Pacific islands to boost regional climate information and early-warning systems.

NOAA will train 200 technicians and data scientists from the countries on how to collect and analyze weather data using weather balloons and ground-based instruments. The data will be fed into early-warning systems that will be shared with the countries’ forecasting services.

As part of the U.S.-funded effort in Africa, NOAA plans to share computer models that predict heat waves with national and local weather forecasters and health officials in Senegal, according to agency administrator

Richard Spinrad.

These forecasts, known as products, are widely used in the U.S. but need to be tailored to the weather patterns that affect Senegal.

“They are looking for a product that would tell them you are going to see temperatures in excess of 30 or 35 degrees Celsius here, here and here starting next Tuesday,” Dr. Spinrad said of Senegalese officials he met at COP27. “They may make sure if they have limited air conditioning capabilities to convert them to cooling centers so people can go there, have water available and also medical services.”

Weather satellites operated by U.S. and European agencies measure atmospheric and ocean surface temperature, but on-the-ground data is missing from huge swaths of the planet, according to Markus Repnik, director of the WMO’s Systematic Observations Financing Facility secretariat.

The heat early-warning system with the Senegal Ministry of Health and Red Cross Senegal is a pilot project that NOAA officials hope to extend to other African nations.

In the Pacific, NOAA is working with island nations to develop software to forecast storm surges and periods of heavy rainfall associated with the tropical storms that are becoming more intense as the planet warms, according to Sarah Kapnick, NOAA’s chief scientist.

“With tropical cyclones, one of the largest signatures of climate change is the increase of rainfall,” Dr. Kapnick said. “It’s not just storm surge inundation and sea level rise. It’s also inland flooding.”

Government officials in Madagascar said they could have benefited from a more advanced climate early-warning system after the island was hit by six tropical cyclones between January and March. The storms killed more than 200 people and left more than 450,000 without adequate food, according to the U.S. Agency for International Development.

“We need daily weather information and data that we are only able to get through meteorological stations,” said Nirivololona Raholijao, director of Météo Madagascar, the country’s national meteorological agency. Dr. Raholijao said she wants to increase the number of weather stations in the country to 116 from the current 25 with help from the U.N. program.

Officials from NOAA met with Panamanian government officials last month to discuss how improved data collection and medium-term weather forecasting could give warnings of high winds that knock shipping containers off cargo vessels transiting the Panama Canal.

“It doesn’t happen very often,” Dr. Kapnick said. “But knowledge of it is very critical.”

Write to Eric Niiler at [email protected]

Corrections & Amplifications
Sarah Kapnick, NOAA’s chief scientist, said tropical storms are becoming more intense as the planet warms, and the Nordic Development Fund pledged $50 million toward the creation of a climate early-warning system. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that Dr. Kapnick said tropical storms are becoming more frequent, and incorrectly identified the donor as the Nordic Development Bank. (Corrected on Nov. 16)