The Pre-post Forecaster Training Course for WMO Fellowship Students was held from August 29th to December 23rd, 2016, in China Meteorological Administration Training Center (CMATC), namely WMO RTC-Beijing, China. Two WMO Fellowship students from Malawi and Central Africa respectively have participated in and successfully completed the training course.
The Pre-post Forecaster Training Course is aimed to enhance the trainees’ comprehensive analysis and forecasting ability, to equip them with sufficient knowledge and skills to become a competent weather forecaster through in-classroom study, historical examples analysis and real-time weather forecasting practices, as well as field trip to operational units of China Meteorological Administration (CMA). The courses are delivered by experienced lecturers of CMATC, senior weather forecasters, and senior experts from CMA operational units and Universities.
Moreover, each WMO Fellowship student is required to submit a thesis regarding a specific topic elaborated during the training course. A supervision group consisted of professors of CMATC was set up to provide individual tutorials to help them follow the training course and complete their thesis. Two thesis were presented: “Statistical Analysis of Rainfall Trend and Water Vapor Distribution over the Central African Republic” by Jovial Gba-Gombo and “Analysis of Tropical Cyclone and its influence over Southern Africa: Case Study of Malawi” by Noel Banda in their oral defense sessions and answered professors’ questions, after which they were rewarded the certification of the completion of the training course.
The two WMO Fellowship students all expressed their appreciation to CMA & CMATC and both hope to use the valuable knowledge and skills they learnt from here in their future work when they go back to their home countries.
The Pre-post Forecaster Training Course is one of the core training subjects of CMATC. Since 2005, more than 2000 weather forecasters from CMA, Civil Aviation Administration of China and Hong Kong Observatory, etc. have attended the training. CMATC started to enroll WMO Fellowship students in 2012. Over the past 5 years a total of 19 WMO fellows from different countries have received the training.
