TAHMO founder visit to IMTR

Professor John Selker, TAHMO Co-founder Director tours ARCUS sites in Kenya. What better way to start the tour than with the Kenya Meteorological Department?

On 9th February, he began the ARCUS field tour in Kenya by visiting the Kenya Meteorological Department (KMD), TAHMO's long-serving partner for over a decade, and the Institute for Meteorological Training and Research (IMTR), training branch of KMD that provides specialized training and research in meteorology. During this visit, he met the directors from both offices: Edward M. Muriuki, Director of KMD, and Benard Chanzu, Director of IMTR. The meetings focused on key issues of collaboration, enhancing the testbed sites, equipping calibration facilities, improving climate education, improving data collection and forecasts, and bringing field teams together.

He also toured the IMTR-TAHMO testbed and went through all the instruments in the testbed, discussing detailed insights on how to achieve a gold-standard weather network through the ARCUS project. The discussions highlighted the importance of station co-location in filling data gaps and how that would help with data quality control.

Later in the evening, he hosted KMD Director Muriuki at the TAHMO headquarters offices located at IMTR for a very productive meeting, during which he also walked the Director through the ARCUS QA/QC dashboard. This dashboard is a tool developed by TAHMO for field engineers to closely monitor each station’s performance daily. It provides real-time insights into station health, flags potential issues early, and helps reduce downtime, critical steps toward achieving gold-standard validation, with stations performing above 95% uptime.

In Professor John’s words, “At TAHMO, we might not be perfect, but we keep our word and always give our best.