Southern African meteorologists say regional residents can expect another year of mostly normal rainfall, but with drought-stricken areas repeating dry patterns that have persisted for years and Indian Ocean nations subject to more cyclones.
The prognosticators are quite aware that weather has become a matter of political consequence, and disaster management hinges on the outcome of sun, rain and wind.
”More so probably than in other places around the globe, people’s lives and welfare depend on the accurate work of meteorologists in Southern Africa,” says Senanele Shongwe, a meteorologist with the Swaziland National Weather Service.
In Southern Africa, 70% of natural disasters are weather related.
Each September, meteorologists with the national weather services of the 13 member states of the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) release a report on the upcoming summer’s seasonal weather.
”Summer is when the action hits, after the usually dry, cool and quiet winter months. It is important to get an early picture of what the weather will bring,” says Shongwe.
Rainfall patterns determine crop forecasts. The probable harvests of populations that are primarily agricultural are essential for food relief agencies to gather data to determine the amount of grain required in the months ahead, and to position a distribution system so food shortfalls do not lead to famine.
The new millennium has brought declining harvests in drought-stricken areas from Zambia to Lesotho, but also flooding in Mozambique, South Africa and Swaziland that has cut into food production.
”Disease during summer months is directly related to weather,” says health worker Agnes Kunene of Manzini, Swaziland. ”Cholera and chronic diarrhoea go hand in hand with heavy rains. Worst affected are urban township slums and rural homestead without proper sanitation, where people crowd into substandard huts.”
Malaria is a prime concern for health officials, who look to weather forecasts to determine areas likely to experience the heavy rains that breed mosquitoes. Eighty percent of Swazi families live as subsistence farmers, growing scarcely enough to live on. Nearly 60% of the Lesotho people live the same ancient lifestyle. When capital to run these small plot farms is obtained, it is usually enough to purchase only seeds and to rent a tractor for cultivation.
”There is little left over for such capital-intensive projects as irrigation. Crops are entirely rain-dependent. When rains cease, the crops wither in the fields. Or there may be normal rainfall over the course of the year, like 2003 and 2004, but for a three-week period during the hottest weeks of January, rains cease at the critical moment when crops are maturing, and their growth is stunted or stopped,” said Shongwe.
This explains the irony of farmers’ fields dying along the banks of flowing rivers, because no irrigation infrastructure exists to bring the river water to the plants. Beyond subsistence farming, most nations of the region depend on agricultural exports to boost their economies. These can suffer from too little rain, but also too much rain, when trucks bogged down in muddy fields are unable to transport harvested crops.
Hot weather increases energy use, sometimes putting an intolerable strain on nations’ electricity infrastructures, leading to blackouts that wreak havoc on industry.
”Daily weather information is well-disseminated throughout [the] SADC and to a certain extent it is understood, but it is debatable whether the advice is followed,” says Sipho Dlamini, a meteorological consultant with the SADC. The organisation’s office in Maputo, Mozambique, is coordinating data collection among SADC states’ weather services, while trying to upgrade the region’s weather-predicting technology.
”The science is not yet universally understood. The reports are slowly being appreciated as the national meteorological services deliver them in local idiom. Weather reports in some countries are well followed and in others it is still dismissed as an unreliable joke,” said Dlamini.
Dlamini said there is a gap between the commercial returns appreciated by meteorological services and funds available for weather forecasting. Agriculture, construction, tourism, transportation (both passenger and freight), sports and social activities, and even the retail industry — which suffers where customers are kept away from stores because of bad weather — profit from accurate predictions.
”But no meteorological service organisation operates at profit. In SADC countries today, most work is being done at national meteorological services that are paid for at public expense, and at universities and research institutes, usually those dealing with agriculture,” the weather consultant said.
The SADC Drought Monitoring Centre (DMC-Harare), located in Zimbabwe, works to minimise the impact of droughts and floods through an early-warning system that allows areas at risk to plan ahead.
”Unfortunately, the level of socio-economic development in a particular country is the limiting factor with respect to the amelioration of negative impacts of climatic extremes, such as flood or drought,” said Dlamini. ”But the DMC-Harare, as well as other local institutions, has contributed considerably to the understanding of both the temporal and spatial rainfall variability in Southern Africa.”
The region’s national weather services are also members of the World Meteorological Organisation, a United Nations body that allows information-sharing through a private internet-like network called the Global Telecommunications System.
”There is a whole branch of operational meteorology devoted to aviation. No plane leaves an airport before receiving the weather information along its route, from take-off to landing ports,” Shongwe said.
Population settlement patterns are taking into consideration the drought probabilities provided by the Drought Monitoring Centre.
”Structural engineers and architects designing bridges, highways and buildings come to us for rainfall and flooding histories of the area where they want to build, so they can construct to withstand what the weather might bring,” said Dlamini.
As the science of weather prediction grows, more Southern Africans are depending on reliable forecasts than those of who merely want to know whether to take an umbrella with them in the morning. — IPS