The World Meteorological Organization is concerned about the impact of Covid-19 on observations and weather forecasts

As the World Meteorological Organization expressed its concern about the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the quantity and quality of observations and weather forecasts, as well as monitoring climate and atmosphere changes, the organization's global monitoring system is the backbone of all weather and climate services and products provided by 

member states and regions In the 193-member organization.

The Global Monitoring System provides observations on the state of the 

atmosphere and ocean surface from land, sea and space devices, and this data is used to prepare weather analyzes, forecasts, advice and recent warnings.

In a statement issued on Wednesday 1 March, the Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization said that the National Meteorological and Hydrological Services continue to perform their basic functions around the clock, seven days a week, despite the severe challenges posed by the Corona virus pandemic, and yet he acknowledged the increasing restrictions On capabilities and resources.

 He also reported the effects of climate change and the increase in the size of weather-related disasters, noting that Covid-19 poses an additional challenge, and may exacerbate multiple risks at the level of one country, and stressed the need for governments to pay attention to their national capabilities for early warning and weather monitoring on Despite the Covid-19 crisis and its negative global impact.

 The organization said that large parts of the monitoring system are either partially or fully automated, so it is expected that it will continue to operate without significant degradation, probably for several weeks, and in some cases for a longer period, but if the epidemic continues for more than a few weeks, the loss of repair, maintenance and supply For hardware and loss of redeployments it will become a growing concern for the organization and will cause it not to work well

 The World Meteorological Organization decided that some parts of the observing system had already been affected, most notably the significant decrease in air traffic that had a clear and significant impact, as measurements during flight of the ambient temperature and wind speed are very important information for both weather forecasting and climate monitoring, as they contribute Commercial aircraft in the aircraft meteorological data retransmission system, which uses onboard sensors, computers and communication systems to collect, process, coordinate and send meteorological observations to Earth stations or via satellite Lat radio.

 The organization said that surface weather observations are almost completely automated, but that in many developing countries, the transition to automatic monitoring is still in progress, and the meteorological community still relies on observations made by weather monitors manually and is transferred to international networks for use in Weather models and global climate, the World Meteorological Organization has witnessed a significant decrease in the availability of this type of manual observations during the past two weeks due to the Corona virus.

 Currently, the adverse effect of loss of observations on the quality of weather forecast products is still expected to be relatively modest, but with continued and declining availability and availability of weather observations, we may expect a significant decrease in predictability reliability.