In Sunkoshi Rural Municipality of Sindhuli district, several water supply schemes were completed recently, while many others are under-construction. These are vital projects for communities struggling with water stress. But the scenario warranted an evident question: Were these schemes designed considering the actual climate of the area?

Importantly, the municipality has no local weather station; no reliable record of rainfall patterns, temperature trends, or shifting precipitation. Engineers and planners are designing infrastructure meant to last decades with only a fraction of the information they need. The same gap was observed in Waling Municipality of Syangja district, where the local government has invested heavily in water supply, drainage, sewerage, and runoff control without detailed data on local rainfall intensity, frequency, or how the climate there is changing.

These are not isolated cases either. They are symptoms of a much larger problem. Nepal is building roads, water systems, settlements, and disaster plans for a changing climate, while often missing the most basic information about local weather.

Every municipality and rural municipality in Nepal needs at least one Automated Weather Station (AWS) - more in larger or geographically complex areas. This is not a scientific luxury. It is an investment in better governance, less wasted money, and climate-resilient development.

Geographic demand 
Nepal's terrain makes climate planning unusually hard. The same monsoon that sustains the plains can flood the Tarai, trigger landslides in the hills, and create hazards in the mountains, sometimes all at once.

Rainfall is growing less predictable: short, intense bursts; longer dry spells; shifting snowfall; rising temperatures. All of this affects agriculture, drinking water, roads, bridges, settlements, forests, and disaster risk. Yet many local governments still plan around historical rainfall patterns that may no longer hold. Local weather information is no longer optional but the foundation of sound planning.

Small instrument, outsized value
AWS continuously records rainfall, temperature, humidity, wind, and other conditions in real time- a sharp upgrade from sparse manual readings.
A municipality planning a drinking water system needs to know whether rainfall is rising or falling, whether recharge areas are shifting, and whether existing sources will survive future conditions. A municipality designing drainage needs rainfall 'intensity', not just annual averages. A municipality preparing disaster plans needs to know where extreme rainfall is most likely to trigger floods or landslides. Without this, many decisions are really just educated guesses.

Heed local gaps, costs, and data
The Department of Hydrology and Meteorology (DHM) has expanded Nepal's national weather monitoring network, which is a significant effort. But Nepal has 753 local governments, each with its own geography and climate risks. A national network cannot capture that granularity. Rainfall in one valley can differ sharply from a valley a few kilometres away, especially where elevation and slope vary widely. Local governments need their own climate information.

Floods, landslides, droughts, and fires already consume a large share of public resources every year, mostly through reactive emergency response, relief, and reconstruction - money spent after the damage is done.

AWS cannot prevent disasters, but it can sharpen the decisions around them. It provides evidence to distinguish a genuine climate extreme from damage caused by poor design. It strengthens drought-related decisions with real records instead of assumptions. It gives local governments a transparent basis to justify spending and prioritize investment. Prevention, in short, is cheaper than repeated recovery.

Poor data also means poorly designed infrastructure: drainage systems sized for outdated rainfall assumptions, roads damaged repeatedly by runoff no one accounted for, water sources chosen without regard for future recharge, urban growth that blocks natural drainage and raises flood risk. These failures are rarely about a lack of money. More often, they are about a lack of information, and an AWS costing roughly several hundred thousand rupees, depending on technology and site, is a small price against the cost of infrastructure built on bad assumptions.

A weather station should not sit on a hillside as a scientific curiosity. Its data comes inherently in everyday municipal decisions: water supply planning, drainage and flood management, agricultural advisories, forest fire risk, early warning, land-use planning, infrastructure design, and climate adaptation. Schools and communities can use it too to build climate awareness. This is what federalism should look like - local governments making decisions grounded in their own reality, not borrowed assumptions.

Practical way forward
Nepal does not need a perfect system to start. Every municipality and rural municipality should budget for at least one AWS through its annual planning process. The DHM can provide technical standards, site selection, training, and integration into the national network. Development partners and climate funds can help bridge the transition. Above all, local governments must actually use the data they collect, not merely archive it.
The real question is no longer whether Nepal can afford automated weather stations. It is whether Nepal can keep spending billions on infrastructure and disaster response without knowing the climate conditions those investments are supposed to withstand.

In a country this geographically diverse and climate-exposed, weather data is basic infrastructure - not an add-on. An automated weather station is a small instrument with an outsized return: smarter decisions, more accountable spending, safer communities, and future local governments that are actually prepared for.

[Dr. Dahal is a hydrometeorologist and water management professional at the Nepal Water Conservation Foundation, Kathmandu.]