Weather, climate and the air we breathe - WMO

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... changes have occurred in the orientation of African National Meteorological and Hydrological Services from one of primarily taking meteorological observations to one of contributing to sustainable development by assisting public safety and sensitive economic activities. • • collaboration with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization/ International Centre for Theoretical Physics with the identification of high-impact weather events, impact data, analysis methods and tools. These will support joint initiatives between socioeconomic, environmental and forecasting scientists to develop end-to-end products and services. A workshop to define the content of this system will take place in 2009. A subsequent effort will define predictive skill to help isolate weaknesses in the chain of events from model prediction to the utilization of weather information; THORPEX Africa will contribute to a seamless integrated forecasting system in Africa that uses deterministic and EPS products from days to seasons and decades. This activity will start by identifying existing products at daily, weekly, biweekly and monthly timescales at global centres and assess their availability, quality, utility and potential added value; Forecast verification, damage, losses and cost/benefit assessments will be made from a user perspective and cost/ benefit assessment schemes will be developed in the framework | WMO Bulletin 58 (1) - January 2009 • • of a partnership with the socioeconomic research community; Forecast demonstration projects, training and other capacity-building/infrastructure development are planned, as required by the Madrid action plan (March 2007) and the Brussels programme of action for LDCs adopted by the third UN Conference for LDCs (May 2001). These demonstration projects should include EPS and the next generation of high-resolution deterministic forecasting systems, and satellite application facilities (e.g. EUMETSAT-Meteosat Second Generation). These efforts will improve the limited visibility of NMHSs in some countries as it is an impediment to staff recruitment and development; WWRP/THORPEX Africa will work with WMO/World Weather Watch/WMO Information System to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the Global Telecommunication System over Africa and to develop and implement a telecommunication project to network African university laboratories, research institutes, NMHSs, regional and international centres for data and exchange methods, tools and products. Such an effort will take into account the move to Internet and cellphone communication and strengthening of novel uses of local communication resources. Concluding remarks This article outlined three international efforts coordinated by the WMO to benefit African society by improving prediction capabilities. The first effort is the SWFDP programme. An appealing aspect of this project is the use of the cascading forecasting concept to deliver state-of-the-art operational prediction capabilities to the developing world at relatively low cost. The second project is SDS- WAS that is making a new forecast capability available in Africa. It also has strong links to end-users and serves as a focal for model improvement, product development and new ensemble capabilities for sand- and duststorms. The project has benefited from national resources to establish a regional centre Spain and from cooperation between partners. The third project, THORPEX-Africa, is a long-term vision to improve the prediction and research capabilities within Africa in contrast to the previous efforts that rely more heavily on capabilities outside Africa. A longterm development project requires buy in from the NMHSs and the African users of environmental prediction products. Even with the assumed strong contribution from nearly all components of WMO, a coordinated effort to generate resources is needed to make the vision of THORPEX Africa a reality. One step in resource mobilization, as well as to strengthen links and benefits to endusers, is the recent establishment of THORPEX-Africa as a Group on Earth Observations task. This article seeks to gain feedback from the broader Africa community and other partners to implement this vision.
Acknowledgements We thank the participants without whose contributions, these WMO efforts for Africa would not have been possible. References aFiesiMaMa, E.A., 2007: Weather forecasting in Africa over the last 25 years. WMO Bulletin, 56 (1), 49-51. hollinGsWorth, A. et al., 2005: The transformation of earth-system observations into information of socio-economic value in GEOSS. Q.J. R. Meteorol. Soc., 131, 3493-3512. interGovernMental Panel on cliMate chanGe, 2008: Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007—The Physical Basis. Cambridge University Press. PoolMan, E., H. chiKoore and F. lucio, 2008: Public benefits of the Severe Weather Forecasting Demonstration Project in south-eastern Africa. WMO newsletter MeteoWorld. http:// www.wmo.int/pages/publications/ meteoworld/swfdp_en.html shaPiro, M.A. and A.J. thorPe, 2004: THORPEX International Science Plan. WMO/TD-No. 1246, WWRP/ THORPEX, No. 2, 51 pp. THORPEX/International Core Steering Committee, 2005: THORPEX International Research Implementation Plan, WMO/TD-No. 1258, WWRP/ THORPEX, No. 4, 95 pp. uPPala, S.M. et al., 2005: The ERA-40 reanalysis. Q. J. R. Meteorol. Soc., 131, 2961-3012. WMO, 2007: The Madrid statement and action plan. International Conference on Secure and Sustainable Living: Social and Economic Benefits of Weather, Climate and Water Services. http://www.wmo.int/pages/themes/ wmoprod/documents/madrid07_ ActionPlan_web_E.pdf WMO Bulletin 58 (1) - January 2009 |
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