Working at Weather Impact

When I started my Master’s thesis at Weather Impact, the company where I’ve been working for the past two years, I knew little about tropical meteorology and rain-fed farming. My project, focused on the rainy season in Ghana, immediately sparked my enthusiasm for combining meteorology, real-world applications, and a dose of exotic vibes. Yet, it was from listening the daily chats of my colleagues that words like small holder farmers, African countries like Lesothoand Burundi, or terms like food security and climate resilience became familiar. As an intern, I felt I was experiencing only a 10% of what my colleagues were doing, but that 10% was already very exciting. So when the opportunity came to stay at Weather Impact after my thesis, the decision was an easy one.

As most of our work is project-based, in two years I have done a lot of different types of work. For example, I recently used WRF to produce very high-resolution extreme event hazard maps for the Comoros Island. Previously, I’ve set up several operational weather services disseminated by SMS (in Zimbabwe, Mali, Tanzania, Kenya); together with my colleagues, we have built a chatbot to provide weather and climate information for small holder farmers; and I even joined a consultancy project assisting the Tanzania’s Ministry of Agriculture in developing services similar to ours at Weather Impact.

What I really enjoy about Weather Impact is that, despite being a small company (now nine employees), our reach is vast, both geographically and in terms of the many people and institutions we interact with. Being small means you can’t spend 100% of your time on technical work; for some projects, you’re also the project manager, the communications lead, or the one keeping the budget in check. Despite my initial concerns, I found myself enjoying most of these “non-technical” tasks, which are, of course, also valuable for your career.

It also means you move up quickly, something with both pros and cons. After just a year and a half, I found myself traveling alone to Tanzania to co-host a workshop for senior Ministry of Agriculture officials. You have to stay calm and remind yourself that you’re meant to be the expert in the room. But it’s also a chance to engage with experienced professionals from many organizations on an equal footing and, of course, to learn a lot from them.

Lorenzo Ocelli