29 July 2020, Apia, Samoa – Building the capacity of the Samoa Meteorological Service in providing seasonal forecasts to support their national climate forecasting is the main objective of a three-day training workshop being held this week.
The training is being conducted through the Republic of Korea-Pacific Islands Climate Prediction Services (ROK-PI CliPS) Phase 2 Project, which aims to address the need for more capacity building and training of national meteorological and hydrological services (NMHSs) and in-country stakeholders.
Staff of the Samoa Met Service participating in the training will be given practical hands-on training on two toolkits developed by the ROK-PI CliPS project in its first phase – the Climate Information Toolkit for the Pacific (CliK-P) and the Pacific Island Countries Advanced Seasonal Outlook (PICASO).
CliK-P is a climate prediction software tool regionally tailored for Pacific NMSs. It was developed by APEC Climate Centre (APCC) to enable Pacific island countries to have access to high quality climate information from around the world. It was designed to be user-friendly so Pacific island climate officers can easily use it to generate predictions for their own countries.
PICASO is a PC-based seasonal prediction tool tailored for the Pacific Island countries jointly developed by APCC and SPREP. PICASO produces probabilistic forecast of the seasonal mean rainfall of the given weather stations by customizing the data from the APCC dynamical seasonal prediction multi-model ensemble.
Acting Assistant Chief Executive Officer of the Samoa Meteorological Service, Fuimaono Lameko Talia, said, “We are very pleased to see that great effort has been put into our climate prediction and you have been working tirelessly to bring good models and predictions and improve capacity building not only for us in Samoa but around the Pacific.”
“This is a great capacity building for our staff. We know that nowadays there are a lot of emerging issues as a result of climate change so we need good prediction models and good competitive staff as well in the Pacific to bring about predictions and meet our objectives,” he added.
“Samoa’s Met Office is grateful to SPREP for initiating this training and we are looking forward to the outcomes of the next three days,” he concluded as saying.
The conducting of regional, sub-regional and in-country training programmes are part of the outputs and activities of the project, however, most of these, including this three-day training, have had to be cancelled or postponed as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mr Tile Tofaeono, SPREP’s Climate Prediction Service Coordinator with the Climate Change Resilience Programme, said, “This training has been a long time coming. It was initially planned to be conducted in March this year, but due to the State of Emergency orders put in place by the Government of Samoa in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we were unable to see it through until now.”
The ROK-PI CliPS Phase 2 project is funded by the Government of the Republic of Korea through the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat, and is being implemented by the Pohang University of Science and Technology (POSTECH) and the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP), with support from the APCC.
For more information, please contact Mr Tile Tofaeono, Climate Prediction Services Coordinator at [email protected] or Mr Philip Malsale, COSPPac Climatology Officer, at [email protected].