WaMiSAR establishes meteorological station and soil moisture sensors at Tsumeb and Rosh Pinah mine residue deposits.

During a field campaign in September and October 2025 Karoline Kny and Stefan Norra from Potsdam University and Florian Blum from Hydroisotop visited the mine residue deposits at Tsumeb and Rosh Pinah. At Tsumeb a meteorological station was implemented together with Sinomine engineers (fig. 1) as well as soil moisture sensors for different depths (fig. 2) as was done also at Rosh Pinah. The soil moisture sensors had to be assembled on site at Tsumeb (fig. 3) and Rosh Pinah. Further sensor systems will be implemented during the upcoming field visits. Aside of this, excavators were used for sample collection at Tsumeb and Rosh Pinah (Fig. 4). Soil samples were taken from those pits by Kamuiua Kamundu from Sinomine, Karoline Kny and Stefan Norra at Tsumeb (Fig. 5).

Similar sampling was carried out at the mine residue deposits at Rosh Pinah by Florian Blum, Karoline Kny and Paulina Nangombe from Rosh Pinah Zinc. Here also a comprehensive groundwater sampling took place. More and above that, Karoline Kny sampled mine residue material and surface water at Matchless and Otjihase near Windhoek in cooperation with Consolidated Copper. This work is fundamental to understand the soil water dynamics for the implementation of greening measures. In 2025, further research was carried out by Sensatec and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology on behalf of Rosh Pinah Zinc to study the mobility of lead in soils in and around Rosh Pinah. In addition to that, in September 2025, a team around Christoph Külls from Technical University of Lübeck visited the Stampried Aquifer Region for designing baseline study concepts to analyse impacts of mining activities on the groundwater aquifer. From 16^th till 17^th of October 2025 a status colloquium took place at Potsdam. Harmony Musiyarira and Rennie Munyayi from the Namibia University of Science and Technology (NUST) participated in person (fig. 6). The next in person meeting for the whole WaMiSAR project will be organised in 2026 in Windhoek, Namibia, by our colleagues from NUST.