Associate Partners

Organizations

HIGH impact Weather Lake System HighWAY

HighWAY was a three year project (2017 – 2020) which brought scientists and users together to develop an improved regional warning system, with the aim of reducing loss of life and damage resulting from severe convection and strong winds on Lake Victoria and in the East African region.

The project was financed by DFID under the Weather and Climate Information Services for Africa Programme (WISER Programme) in collaboration with the Met Office (UK), WMO and the African Ministerial Conference on Meteorology (AMCOMET) and in partnership with National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHS) in East Africa, the Lake Victoria Basin Commission and the East African Community (EAC).

Find out more about HIGHWay


Towards Forecast-based Preparedness Action ForPAc

ForPAc is an inter-disciplinary project which aims to improve Early Warning Systems by improving weather-climate forecasts and developing a systematic approach to mobilize disaster-preparedness before hazardous weather events using forecasting information.

The project evolved from existing research networks and involves collaboration between researchers in Kenya and the UK. The team is based at the University of Sussex in the Sussex Climate Science and Society research cluster. ForPAc is funded by NERC and DFID through the Science for Humanitarian Emergencies and Resilience (SHEAR) Research Programme.

Find out more about ForPAc


Climate information services for increased resilience and productivity in Senegal (CINSERE)

The USAID/CINSERE programme was launched in 2016 through a workshop that brought together key stakeholders to assess the specific needs in Climate Information Services (CIS) of the four Feed the Future projects, and to identify possible communication channels that could be used to disseminate forecasting information to benefit farmers, pastoralists and fisher folks. The project implemented a training programme for key stakeholders who are disseminating CIS within each of the FtF projects and to farmers, fisher folks and pastoralists.

Find out more about CINSERE


GCRF-AFRICAP

GCRF-AFRICAP is a major programme to make agriculture and food production in Sub-Saharan Africa more productive, sustainable and resilient to climate change. AFRICAP works with local organisations and governments in Malawi, South Africa, Tanzania and Zambia, to create an evidence base to underpin new country-specific policies in agriculture and food production. AFRICAP is co-developing and carrying out the research needed in each country, from soils, plant and livestock science to meteorology, ecology and political and social sciences. GCRF-AFRICAP is based at the University of Leeds, and like African SWIFT, the AFRICAP programme is funded by UK Research and Innovation Global Challenges Research Fund.

Find out more about GCRF-AFRICAP


RAINWATCH

Because of the difficulty in acquiring daily rainfall data in sub-Saharan Africa and because most of these data are not yet digitized, rainfall data is used much less in forecasting here than in other regions,  despite the region’s high-dependence on rain-fed agriculture.  Together with AfClix (Africa Climate Exchange), the RAINWATCH project closes this gap by increasing the accessibility of usable climate information. RAINWATCH is a simple, low-cost and real-time rainfall monitoring system. It permits the tracking of critical rainfall and temperature attributes and serves as an early warning system that addresses extensive drought and excessive flooding beneficial to different users such as farmers, scientists and policy-makers. RAINWATCH provides users with simple local rainfall and temperature plots presented in a practical format that all can understand.

Find out more about the RAINWATCH project.


Young Earth System Scientists community (YESS)

African SWIFT collaborated with the Young Earth System Scientists community (YESS) on projects such as the International Summer School ‘Tropical Meteorology of West and East Africa’, held at KNUST, Kumasi, Ghana in 2019.

The Forecasters’ Handbook

The following Associate Partners authored chapters in the Meteorology of Tropical West Africa; The Forecasters’ handbookedited by Douglas Parker and Mariane Diop Kane:


Andrew Colman

Andrew is a climate scientist working on calibrating and combining seasonal forecasts, particularly for Africa. He currently works in the forecast verification and outreach team at the Met Office in the UK. Areas of Expertise:

  • Statistical methods of seasonal forecasting and calibration
  • Optimal combination of statistical and multi model dynamical seasonal  forecasts
  • Seasonal Forecasts of tropical rainfall

Andreas Fink

Andreas Fink is a professor at the Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research – Troposphere Research Division. In November 2016 he won the teaching prize for his synoptic course on behalf of the Faculty of Physics at KIT. In May 2015, he won the Vaisala Award for Observing and Instrumentation, from the Royal Meteorological Society in the UK.

Areas of Expertise:

  • Dynamics and predictability of weather phenomena, with a focus in the Tropics
  • Climate variability and change, with regional foci in Africa and Southeast Asia
  • Extreme weather and climate events (cyclones, convective precipitation, droughts)
  • Regional climate modeling, model bias correction
  • Mathematical-biological malaria modeling

Peter Knippertz

Peter Knippertz is the leader of the working group Atmospheric Dynamics, co-speaker of the Collaborative Research Centre Waves to Weather  and coordinator of the EU-FP7 project Dynamics-Aerosol-Chemistry-Cloud Interactions in West Africa (DACCIWA) . He is also the director of the Bachelor and Master programmes in Meteorology at KIT.

Areas of Expertise:

  • Atmospheric dynamics
  • Tropical meteorology
  • Tropical-extratropical interactions
  • Monsoons
  • Convection
  • Dust storms
  • Cyclones
  • Heavy precipitation
  • Numerical weather prediction

Arlene Laing

Arlene Laing is the Coordinating Director Designate of the Caribbean Meteorological Organization (CMO), which coordinates joint scientific and technical activities in weather, climate and water-related sciences in 16 English-speaking Caribbean countries.  Prior to that she was a scientific analyst at the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL) Global Systems Division (GSD), Forecast Impact and Quality Assessment Section (FIQAS). She co-chaired and organized the 2011 National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) colloquium on African weather and climate for 23 graduate students from Africa and the United States, a first of its kind event. She is the lead author of “Introduction to Tropical Meteorology”, a peer-reviewed online textbook produced by the UCAR/COMET Program.

Areas of Expertise:

  • Weather and Climate of the Tropics
  • Mesoscale Meteorology and Convection
  • Satellite Data Analysis and Interpretation
  • Climate Variability and Impacts in Sub-Saharan Africa
  • Tropical Waves and Multi-scale Interactions
  • Heavy Precipitation
  • Impact-based Forecast Verification for Aviation Meteorology
  • E-Learning and Multimedia Instruction