Qatar has announced the installation of a weather station near the Al Wakrah Stadium, on which foundation works are nearing completion.
The station, which is on a surface of 10x10m and includes a 10m high tower, will provide information about temperature, humidity, precipitation intensity and visibility among other factors, Qatar’s Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy (SCDL) said.
The cooling systems designed for the FIFA World Cup 2022 stadium will modulate performance in response to local weather conditions, using data provided by the weather station. This will allow the stadium to be used for football year-round, even after the tournament, SCDL said in a statement.
The committee has installed the first of these stations at the Al Wakrah Stadium. The weather station was developed and installed by the Qatar Mobility Innovations Centre (QMIC), which has experience operating and maintaining national weather stations.
External climatic conditions need to be taken into account by cooling designers, explained Dr Nelson Chilengwe, a mechanical engineer and cooling expert at the SCDL. “We usually get this information from data based on national weather station measurements, like the one at the airport, but for our programme, we wanted to know exactly what the weather is like close to our stadium sites.”
The weather station includes several pieces of equipment such as a sun tracker, sensors for selected gases, solar-powered monitoring of particulate matter, and temperature and humidity sensors.
The QMIC will install two more weather stations at the Al Rayyan and Lusail stadiums, the SCDL statement said. After installation, data will be collected and analysed for three years.
“We have just completed installation at Al Wakrah Stadium. The station monitors and collects information 24 hours a day but we have configured the system to record meteorological data every five minutes while air quality is recorded every 15 minutes,” Chilengwe said.
This information will enable SCDL experts to measure current temperatures, and optimise the cooling system at the stadium so that it can be used even after the high-profile tournament, he added.
“With these localised stations we will be able to determine exactly what the temperature is and automatically control operation of cooling systems against the external conditions, year-round in Qatar as a legacy element.”