Kaah Menang, a meteorologist and researcher from the National Department of Meteorology, Cameroon, is to use a one-year World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Fellowship at ECMWF to work on a Climate Data Store (CDS) application for Africa.
Kaah is not entirely new to Reading, where ECMWF’s headquarters is based: he finished his PhD in atmospheric radiation at the University of Reading in 2012. He was then employed as a forecaster in Cameroon.
Leading a team of on average four people, he produces marine weather forecasts for the general public and for the ports in Cameroon. Kaah’s fellowship at ECMWF started on 2 September 2021.
Plans for the fellowship
Kaah has joined the CDS team at ECMWF to build an application in an area of relevance for Africa. For now, he is familiarising himself with the CDS toolbox.
“There currently is no Climate Data Store application specifically for Africa or central/west Africa,” he notes. “The aim is to select one or two areas for which to develop an application related to disaster risk reduction.”
Kaah will also be taking part in ECMWF weather prediction courses. He feels that, after his fellowship, he should be better equipped to help develop a specific weather model for Cameroon, perhaps based on the US Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF).
“Currently Cameroon relies on forecasts from ECMWF, the UK Met Office, Météo-France, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the UK Hydrographic Office,” he says. “It would be good if in the future we could also run our own system.”
A long-standing scheme
The fellowship is part of a long-standing WMO scheme to provide specialised training placements to develop capacity in least-developed and developing countries.
ECMWF became involved in the scheme in 2015. The aim is to enhance the fellows’ professional skills and enable them to make an essential contribution to developing forecasting capabilities in their own countries.
ECMWF hosted its first WMO fellow, Nguyen Thanh Tung, a forecaster from Vietnam’s National Centre for Hydro-Meteorological Forecasting, in 2016. Kaah is ECMWF’s second WMO fellow.
The fellowship scheme welcomes applications every year. More information can be found on the WMO fellowship page.