11th November, 2016 The Tonga Meteorological Service is to boost its forecasting capabilities using a new SMARTALERT and SMARTMET workstation and software which was developed by a team of experts from the Finnish Meteorological Institute for Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, Fiji, Samoa and Tonga Meteorological Services. The system was installed yesterday at the Tonga Meteorological Service’s Head Quarter in Fua’amotu and training of Forecasters will continue for the next 2 weeks.
This system provides a Forecasters user interface which will allows warnings to be visualized on map format which will then be displayed in the Tonga Met office’s webpage and can be displayed on third party’s websites as well as mobile phones. The map is accompanied by an automatic generated warning texts, and is colored-coded with each colors corresponds to the degree of severity of the potential impacts of the warnings.
According to the Director, ‘Ofa Fa’anunu he said “ It has been a long standing challenge that faces the Office from time to time is using of language in our warning products that is understandable to everyone. Sometimes it is said the language we use is too technical to be understood, and often at times it is said the warning is too long to read. However, with pictorial formats we hope it will help the public better understand our warnings when it becomes operational.”
All costs for the development of the system and installation is funded through the assistance of the Finnish Government under its project to Meteorological Services in the Pacific aiming at reducing vulnerability of Pacific Island communities’ livelihoods to the effects of climate change.
This is not the first time this team of experts from Finnish Meteorological Institute visited the office. The first visit was in September 2014 when they installed the SMARMET system – an operational tool which is currently used at the office for downloading numerical weather prediction data as well as satellite imageries and also used for analyzing of these data before forecast is formulated.
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