

That’s almost twice the normal amount.Ībsurd, many scientists thought. Scientists in the Netherlands measured 805 hours of sunshine in the spring. The Netherlands, for example, had the sunniest spring since the measurements began in 1901. The sky was bizarrely blue in Western Europe and it was extremely sunny. It caught the attention of scientists and media worldwide. “We salute their dedication to protecting lives and property but we are mindful of the increasing constraints on capacity and resources.In this episode we discuss a striking event that occurred over our heads in the summer of 2020. Taalas added: “National Meteorological and Hydrological Services continue to perform their essential 24/7 functions despite the severe challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic.” “WMO will continue to monitor the situation, and the organization is working with its Members to mitigate the impact as much as possible.”
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“WMO has seen a significant decrease in the availability of this type of manual observations taken every few hours and reported to national centres over the last two weeks,” Mr. The situation is also concerning in many developing countries, where data is retrieved manually by weather observers, before being shared with international forecasting databases “However, as the decrease in availability of aircraft weather observations continues and expands, we may expect a gradual decrease in reliability of the forecasts.” Data dip in developing countries “At the present time, the adverse impact of the loss of observations on the quality of weather forecast products is still expected to be relatively modest”, said Mr. The impact has been less severe in the US, where commercial airline traffic data is down by 60 per cent, WMO said.
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In Europe, where air traffic readings are down by 85 to 90 per cent according to WMO, countries affiliated with 31 national weather services are already discussing how to boost the short-term capabilities of other parts of their observing networks, to mitigate this loss of aircraft-sourced data. This data and much more is fed into WMO’s Global Observing System, which supports weather and climate services and products provided by the 193 WMO Members. Many parts of the global weather monitoring system are automated, such as satellites and land-based observation points.īut other parts of the network have experienced a “dramatic” impact over the last few weeks – such as high-altitude readings - thanks to a sharp decrease in air traffic levels.īefore the COVID-19 era, commercial airlines took around 700,000 daily readings of air temperature, wind speed and wind direction. Without reliable weather data, the COVID-19 pandemic “poses an additional challenge and may exacerbate multi-hazard risks at a single-country level”, the WMO chief maintained. He explained that the devastating impacts of climate change haven’t stopped since the new coronavirus emerged in December, and neither have the “growing” number of weather-related disasters. In a statement, WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas urged Governments to support their national early warning and weather observing capacities despite the “severe challenges” caused by the COVID-19 crisis.
