30th September, 2016 Effective last evening a television weather presentation has gone to air on Television Tonga as part of a partnership with Tonga Broadcasting Commission (TBC) to improve weather services for the general public. This project was made possible with combined efforts of the technical staff of both the Meteorology Department and Tonga Broadcasting as well as the inputs a JICA Senior Volunteer (Mr. Nobuo Obara) working with the Tonga Meteorological Service (TMS).
The Director of the Meteorology Department Mr. ‘Ofa Fa’anunu said,“having better television weather information available for the public has always been on our implementation agenda. We are delighted to work together with our partner agency TBC to provide this service.
“Although the presentation still needs further development to get it to a higher level of sophistication but we are happy to make a start and to improve on the graphics as we go along.”
“It is our great hope that being able to show what the weather is doing and likely to do on television that it will raise awareness at all levels that the weather forecast is another tool anyone can use to plan their activities. Weather it is fishing, farming, sporting or planning a day out with the family. At the present we are just using simple tools and graphics through PowerPoint to create these weather presentations but we are hopeful we can improve on this in the very near future.
I am extremely appreciative of Mr. Nobuo Obara, the JICA Senior Volunteer as well as JICA who have been working with us on the production of this new service as part of Mr. Obara’s deployment to TMS.”
The presentation includes weather satellite animations and model as well as manually generated graphical information.
The partnership project is a part of the Met Service and TBC goal to better improve weather services to the public.
ENDS
For further information please contact the Meteorology Division on 35355 or metstaff@met.gov.to. More information is also available at www.met.gov.to
