From February the 25 till the 28, MFI had the pleasure to welcome the second Steering Committee of the Modernization Project of INAMET to France. The Angolan delegation was composed of:

-    Mr. Domingos Nascimento, Director General, INAMET

-    Mr. Matias Manuel da Silva Borges, National Director Information Technologies and Meteorology, MTTI

-    Mr. Francisco Osvaldo Sebastião Neto, Assessor, INAMET

-    Mrs. Luzia Mitange, Project Director, INAMET

On the French side, the following persons attended:

-    Mr. Patrick Bénichou, President, MFI

-    Mr. Fabrice Claverie, Project Director, MFI

-    Mrs. Silvana Latavanha, Interpreter, MFI

The program started on the 25th with a visit of Météo-France’s facilities in Paris and a meeting with its Deputy Director, Mrs Anne Debard.  Our guests also had the opportunity to visit Météo-France’s Media Unit to have a demonstration of MetaCast: a weather graphic solution that may be implemented at INAMET’s headquarters to significantly improve its production capabilities, especially towards TV channels.

On the second day, the Steering Committee took its participants to Toulouse, where MFI has its headquarters and Météo-France its main operational center. The Angolan delegation was able to visit Météo-France’s forecasting room, its data center as well as a maintenance and calibration center for observation equipment. A meeting with the company STERELA (subcontractor of MFI for the PMI project) was also organized: it was the opportunity to see, in operational conditions, the automatic weather stations that will be implemented in Angola in the coming months.

The last two days of the Steering Committee were dedicated to a complete review of the progress of the project. MFI’s teams also made several demonstrations of the solutions that will soon be running in INAMET’s headquarters: OBSMET (data collection system), SYNERGIE-WEB (forecasting system), AEROMETWEB (pilot briefing system) and METEOFACTORY (production system for EWS and PWS). 

In the end, this busy 4-day schedule gave rise to many fruitful and enriching discussions that will allow the PMI project to continue to progress at good pace. All participants said goodbye, having in mind the third Steering Committee that will take place in a few months in Luanda.