World Meteorological Day 2025: Early warning systems are imperative

Scientific weather observations confirm this; news reports of damage caused by extreme rain or heat echo this as do already-constrained budgets required to deal with infrastructural damage, not to mention the price ordinary citizens pay in the form of trauma and displacement caused by chaos and loss following severe weather events.

This year’s World Meteorological Day has the theme ‘Closing the Early Warning Gap Together’.

António Guterres, United Nations Secretary-General, in his message for World Meteorology Day on 23 March 2025, says, “…in this new climate reality, early warning systems are not luxuries. They are necessities and sound investments – providing an almost ten-fold return. Yet, almost half the world’s countries still lack access to these life-saving systems. It is disgraceful that, in a digital age, lives and livelihoods are being lost because people have no access to effective early warning systems.”

The Weather and Climate Information Services (WISER) programme’s Early Warnings for Southern Africa (EWSA) project is a collaborative project implemented by partners in Mozambique, South Africa, Zambia, the United Kingdom (UK), Switzerland and Finland. WISER EWSA, led by the University of Leeds, is part of the WISER Programme which is funded with UK International Development from the UK government and led by the Met Office in the UK.

WISER EWSA is one of several international initiatives that support the United Nations’ Early Warnings for All (EW4All) initiative, led by the World Meteorological Organization, which aims to ensure that every person on Earth is protected from hazardous weather, water and climate events through early warning systems by 2027.

Of the four EW4All main pillars, WISER EWSA contributes to two, namely, the detection, observation, monitoring, analysis and forecasting of hazards – promoting the sound scientific basis for forecasts and the accurate and timely generation of warnings; and warning dissemination and communication – ensuring warnings reach all of those at risk and that the recipients understand the warnings and what their response should be.

WISER EWSA fulfils its role in two ways. First, the transdisciplinary WISER EWSA team is co-producing nowcast-based early warning alerts in southern Africa. Second, as a result of the co-production process, the project team is supporting greater inclusion in local structures that are at the frontline of climate action.

Co-producing weather information involves different people coming together to generate something useful and useable. WISER EWSA does this within the project team, which comprises meteorologists and forecasters, researchers, social scientists, economists, and user engagement specialists. It also does this outside the project team – by ensuring the target users of the early warning alerts are actively involved in the process by defining what information is helpful and how it should be presented. 

The project has implemented three testbeds since its inception in 2023: an intensive two-week testbed in Zambia with centres in Mozambique and South Africa in January and February 2024; an extended testbed, dubbed the ‘king-size testbed’, running throughout the rainy seasons in the three countries from October 2024 to April 2025; and another intensive two-week testbed in Zambia in January and February 2025 with centres in Mozambique and South Africa.

A fourth intensive testbed will commence in Mozambique, with centres in the other two countries, on 22 March 2025 and conclude on 27 March 2025.

The recent testbed illustrates how the WISER EWSA team is working with community members at the frontline of climate action. The co-production process has a particular focus on women and people with disability – who are often marginalised from such processes, and weather information and early warning alerts if their particular preferences are not taken into account.

Volunteers (community observers) in all three countries have been actively providing feedback on nowcasts to support verification. They have also been embracing the opportunity to raise awareness of weather and early warnings in their communities, putting up posters in public places and meeting with individuals (particularly persons with disability) and groups such as churches and schools. 

In Zambia and Mozambique, these voluntary roles have been aligned with the local disaster management committees to ensure that the new form of early warning is integrated with broader disaster risk reduction and disaster management efforts.

On the technical side, the team has seen the meteorological services in the three countries – INAM (Mozambique), SAWS (South Africa), and ZMD (Zambia) – increasingly taking ownership of nowcasting processes, issuing nowcasts independently and expanding their reach beyond the initial project scope. This highlights the growing confidence and capability of forecasters in interpreting models and operationalising nowcasting.

Another lesson concerns the significant challenge of effectively disseminating nowcasting messages. With severe storms developing rapidly or changing their path without warning over the space of a couple of hours, messages and updates must be sent quickly. This includes ensuring nowcasts are issued with enough lead time and clarity for users to take appropriate action. Diversifying communication channels (e.g. by combining digital platforms with traditional media such as radio) helps ensure broader coverage and accessibility. INAM in Mozambique, for example, has successfully expanded the reach of nowcasts nationally by disseminating them via WhatsApp, radio, TV, and SMS. Additionally, it has tailored communication to diverse audiences by translating messages into local languages.

The 2025 theme of World Meteorological Day not only perfectly aligns with WISER EWSA’s mandate, but it also adds impetus to the work of many roleplayers tasked with strengthening the resilience of countless vulnerable communities across countries to respond effectively to severe weather events.