Weather and air quality services of Uzbek hydrometeorological services will be enhanced through a four-year project

Modern day Uzbek society is exposed to earthquakes, drought, flooding, mudslides, and landslides. Specifically, climate change causes higher temperatures, greater variability in precipitation, and increased frequency of extreme weather events. These events increase the pressure on water resources, land, biodiversity, and ecosystems making the economy and its development in Uzbekistan sensitive to weather and climate conditions. To enhance the resilience of Uzbekistan to changing climate and extreme weather events, Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI) and Centre of Hydrometeorological Service of the Republic of Uzbekistan (Uzhydromet) have started a four-year long project funded by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland through Institutional Cooperation Instrument.

Modern weather and air-quality services and capacity building

The cooperation project will modernize the weather and early warning service provision of Uzhydromet through installing open-source and free-of-charge SmartMet and SmartMet Alert software developed at the Finnish Meteorological Institute. In addition to the automation of weather service process, custom tailored weather and early warning products become more easily accessible. The project will pilot newly tailored weather and early warning products at a community level. The project will give a significant amount of effort to capacity building at all steps of value chain for weather and early warning services starting from observations and ending up to customer services. Additionally, there is a growing need for reliable information on real-time air quality to assess health and environmental impacts, inform the public and plan emission reduction strategies. The project will install a pilot network of low-cost air quality sensors after verifying them against the reference-level air quality station of Uzhydromet. The capacity for quality assurance and control of Uzhydromet staff will be enhanced through trainings during collaboration.

Further information:

Anne Hirsikko, Project manager, Finnish Meteorological Institute, tel. +358 50 4686753