Proposal
Design and Justification of Forecasting Development in Equatorial Africa
Downloadable Copies:
Introduction Presentation:
Summary:
The purpose of this research project is to design and justify an effective weather forecasting and climate-monitoring network for the region of equatorial Africa (between 10N and 10S). The region of study (Figure 1) has roughly the same area size and population as the United States. Therefore, many people are affected by and would benefit from a more effective and updated operational forecasting system. Since weather has both societal and economical effects, it is necessary to measure and predict the most useful weather information for the public at the least cost. There are several basic concepts that this research will focus on. To begin with, the infrastructure of each of the countries will be studied in order to give some background knowledge. This includes the societal/demographical background, the current forecasting abilities and observation networks, the economics of meteorology (salaries, observation network overhead), and forecast consumers and their applications.
In parallel with building background knowledge about each country, the basic weather and climate variability of each country will also be researched. This includes daily temperatures and variability, precipitation and its space and time variability, important weather events to predict, as well as time and space scales of variation. With this, the skill of the modeling systems to predict such weather events will also be researched.
Thus begins the implementation of a weather forecasting and climate monitoring system for the region of study. The main items that will be focused on for this implementation is the instrumentation (what is needed, cost, quality), the analysis of observed data, how to generate forecasts from analyzed data, and how to effectively distribute forecasts to society. In terms of communicating to the public, we will attempt to figure out if a problem lies with the forecasters themselves disseminating the message, or if there is simply inadequate prediction from the available models since most of the forecasts that are longer than 24 hours do not actually depend on observations over Africa.
Since this is a remote research project most of our research is going to be conducted through the Internet and e-mail. We will evaluate the current national weather services, climatology for each country and decide what improvements and/or additions can be made to each country's and the region’s observation and forecasting systems. We will be contacting leaders of the region by e-mail to obtain first-hand information. Overall, our research is going to be conducted nearly exclusively through the online information gathering as opposed to actual on-site observations.
The region that we have selected for study is comprised of diverse countries, large and small, that are affected by a variety of serious weather conditions. It is important that each of these countries has a sufficient forecasting and observing system in place so the people of these countries can be prepared and protected in the event of severe weather. Therefore, we will evaluate the usefulness of forecasts and justify improvement of the forecasting networks.