Deale, Maryland – The United Nation’s weather and climate agency, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), has entered into a cooperative agreement with the International Environmental Data Rescue Organization (IEDRO) to help establish and sustain data rescue projects in Bolivia, Namibia and Uganda.
Funds from the WMO’s Voluntary Cooperation Programme (VCP) are being released to IEDRO to support the training of personnel and to purchase critical equipment needed to rescue and digitize weather data recorded on paper, microfiche / microfilm and photographs. IEDRO volunteers will be digitizing the rescued data.
The data will be sent to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), where it will be compiled and analyzed. After processing, the data will be returned to each country and made freely available to the world scientific community so scientists everywhere can make use of the information to better understand weather patterns and climate change.
These projects will be facilitated by WMO’s Scientific Officer, Hama Kontongomde and IEDRO’s Executive Director, Dr. Richard Crouthamel. IEDRO hopes the data it retrieves will help save lives by improving the ability of governments and non-governmental agencies to better predict and respond to natural disasters and severe weather conditions.
Operating in a dozen countries worldwide, IEDRO locates, rescues and digitizes weather and other environmental data which is stored on perishable media. In the interests of creating a safer, healthier world, the digitized data is made available to IEDRO’s host countries and the international scientific community via the United State’s environmental database at NCDC.
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