Free Data Tools Helping Indian Ocean Weather Services Make Their Records Useful

Mohamed Bacar Mohamed Albirune, IT Technical Director at the National Agency for Civil Aviation and Meteorology (ANACM), oversees data from automatic stations, manual observers and cyclone monitoring.

Weather records are only useful if the people who need them can find them. In Comoros, rainfall measurements, river levels and storm observations are spread across spreadsheets, individual computers and paper files, leaving staff with the difficult job of bringing scattered information together before they can analyse it.

Mohamed Bacar Mohamed Albirune, IT Technical Director at the National Agency for Civil Aviation and Meteorology (ANACM), oversees data from automatic stations, manual observers and cyclone monitoring. His agency still lacks a standard database covering its entire station network, a problem familiar to many small National Meteorological and Hydrological Services across the South-West Indian Ocean.

Commercial systems can be expensive and difficult to maintain with a small technical team. Without a shared database, specialists spend valuable time searching for records, limiting the information they can provide for flood warnings, seasonal forecasts and other services communities depend on.

Nine days of training with real station data

In August 2026, technicians and engineers from Comoros, Madagascar, Mauritius and Seychelles gathered in Seychelles for nine days of practical training organised by the World Meteorological Organization under its Early Warning System for Floods project.

They worked with MCH, short for Meteorology, Climatology and Hydrology, a free, open-source database management system designed specifically for weather, climate and water data. National services can install it, adapt it and develop it further without paying licensing fees, making it a useful option for organisations with tight budgets.

The sessions used real station records, giving participants a chance to work through the kinds of problems they face at home. A climate scientist from the Seychelles Meteorological Authority praised the trainers for adapting to participants' needs and helping people with different levels of experience follow the course.

For a Mauritian engineer, the benefits already extended beyond organising records. The system supported products that had not previously been available, including hydrological summaries and climate indicators, showing how better data management can lead to more useful information.

Comoros starts small, with plans to expand

Comoros is preparing a small pilot project using data from its automatic weather stations before extending MCH across the full observation network. Starting with part of the network gives the team a manageable first step towards connecting records that currently sit in separate places. For Albirune, the training also brought confidence that the challenges could be tackled together.

Work by participants offers a glimpse of what they can build with the system. In Madagascar, participants developed a station-monitoring dashboard displaying rainfall stations and measurements over time. In Comoros, participants developed a dashboard for monitoring microservices that support weather information and customer-query services.

These examples show the range of work surrounding a database: keeping track of observations, making measurements easier to examine and supporting the services through which information reaches users.

Keeping the tools useful after the workshop

A free download does not remove the need for skilled staff, reliable support and time to put a new system into everyday use. Participants called for continued mentoring and a regional community where users could share problems and work out solutions together.

That support matters when teams return to their own station networks and encounter records, equipment and working practices that differ from those used during training. Access to someone who can help resolve a technical problem can make the difference between a system becoming part of daily work and falling out of use.

The experience in Seychelles offers a practical lesson for other small hydrometeorological services. Open-source tools can make better data management affordable, but sustained benefits depend on giving staff the resources, skills and support to keep using them.