The Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NiMet) hopes to improve urban climate monitoring across the country following the donation of LoRaWan-enabled weather stations.

This upgrade, a collaborative effort between Barani Design Technologies and the West African Science Service Center on Climate Change & Adapted Land Use (WASCAL), promises to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of weather data collection in urban environments.

“This initiative marks a significant step forward in our commitment to providing accurate and timely weather information,” said Hamid Abdulkareem, NiMet’s engineering director. “These advanced weather stations will be instrumental in helping us achieve our targets.”

He described this donation as additional to the existing 25 Barani weather stations that are currently operational in the NiMet network. A total of 59 compact automatic weather stations, including Barani products, are being reactivated to boost the agency’s weather station density and improve observation and forecasting capability.

Abdulkareem called on Barani and WASCAL to ensure the NiMet technical team were promptly informed of capacity-building opportunities to ensure the sustainability of the automated weather stations and their seamless transmission to NiMet’s data centre.

Jan Barani, CEO of Barani Design Technologies, explained that these smart, energy-efficient weather stations had been developed to improve data accuracy and reliability across urban areas.

“The breakthrough comes as part of an initiative to make weather monitoring systems more compatible with modern smart city environments,” Barani said. “This was necessary because traditional weather stations often struggle with inconsistent measurements and the challenges of relocation.”

The design is focused on reducing power consumption, made possible through the advancement of IoT wireless technologies.

Diallo Abdulaziz, coordinator of WASCAL’s data management department, said as part of efforts to strengthen Nigeria’s meteorological network, NiMet (nimet.gov.ng) in partnership with Barani Design Technologies (www.baranidesign.com) and WASCAL (wascal.org), was enhancing power and connectivity for its weather stations nationwide.

The stations are built to meet the rigorous standards set by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO, wmo.int). This adherence to standards ensures the data collected are both accurate and comparable, facilitating better weather forecasting and analysis.