Lessons learned from the CIRDA Programme

Climate change is causing major impacts in many African countries, disproportionately affecting the poorest and most vulnerable populations. One essential requirement for adapting effectively to a changing climate is access to reliable, credible weather and climate information on which to base decisions. 

Unfortunately, as evidenced by the large number of “non-reporting” weather stations and the absence of effective forecasts and warnings of hazardous weather events in many Sub-Saharan countries, weather and climate information systems in this region are currently of poor quality. While there have been many efforts to improve observations and forecasting of weather and climate in this region, few have had much success or long-lasting impact.

Recognizing the need to improve critical environmental monitoring and forecasting systems, several Sub-Saharan countries sought assistance from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), with funding from the Global Environment Facility (GEF) Least Developed Countries Fund (LDCF). In response in 2013, the  GEF approved support for projects in 11 African least developed countries (LDCs). Similarly, and responding to requests and the lessons from past failures, the 11 partner countries, including Benin, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Liberia, Malawi, Sao Tome and Principe, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, The Gambia, Uganda, and Zambia developed a new vision for weather and climate information services in collaboration with UNDP that resulted the Programme for Climate Information for Resilient Development in Africa (CIRDA). 

This program included several unique features, these included: 

• Utilizing an end-to-end systems engineering approach; 
• Encouraging use of innovative, less expensive fully integrated monitoring and forecasting equipment; 
• Basing communication systems for data collection and dissemination of information products on the cell network; 
• Establishing long-term agreements for procurement of integrated packages of hardware, software, installation services, and training; 
• Creating a multidisciplinary support team to work with and across countries, aid in procurement actions, and facilitate learning and information sharing; 
• Fostering collaboration with private providers of weather equipment, services, and communication; and 
• Supporting outreach to businesses in need of tailored weather and climate information services to help define needed system improvements and potentially to become sources of revenue for improving the sustainability of public weather services.  

The implementation of CIRDA with its innovative features over a four-year period produced some notable successes and identified many challenges to improving weather and climate information services in LDCs. The lessons learned in the CIRDA Programme are now being reflected in the design of more recent projects and the consideration of new policies by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and other international organizations.  

While the CIRDA Programme, officially concluded in December of 2019 the project developed various communications and information products to guide a new generation of climate information projects for adaptation. Resources include the report A New Vision for Weather and Climate Services in Africa, a continental-scale market assessment on the potential for climate information services in Africa, a communications toolkit for communicating early warning systems and most recently the project has produced a terminal evaluation report with the aim of generating best practices and lessons learned when looking to replicate a similar approach to vulnerable countries in enhancing their climate information services. 

Among the conclusions of the evaluation report includes an acknowledgment of the success of the Programmer to deliver considerable results by the end of its implementation, including its capacity to enhance national efforts in monitoring and forecasting extreme weather and identifying effective communication channels through potential partnerships. The evaluation also recognized the Program's success in facilitating the efficient and effective use of hydro-meteorological information for generating early warning and long term development plans, as reflected in national score cards and in the commissioned market assessment. A key achievement identified through the project is the support provided by programme specialist to identify capacity gaps in national partners and mobilizing support to address these including in helping guide appropriate exit strategies to ensure long term sustainability.

The evaluation also recommended as a lessons learned from the project an improved focus on baseline analysis as well as risk monitoring to allow for an enhanced systematization of impact. The project, if replicated should consider an enhanced monitoring framework to allow for a better documentation of project results. 

CIRDA Training Wokshop on a Systems Approach to Observing Networks

UNDP in partnership with the Government of Tanzania held a three day training workshop on technology transfer and innovation for climate change and early warning systems in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania from 14-16 October. International renowned experts worked with 11 partner African countries to increase resilience to climate change through access to climate data for sustainable planning. Africa is one of the most vulnerable regions to the negative impact of climate change. Farmers and rural communities are particularly vulnerable due to their lack of access to information.

This workshop was part of the support provided through UNDP's Multi Country Support Programme to Strengthen Climate Information Systems in Africa (CIRDA) that is working with national met services in bringing new technologies and capacities to help farmers, policy makers and the private sector make informed decisions in the face of climate change. The CIRDA Programme financed by the GEF's Least Developed Country Fund, is an example of the concrete actions that African countries are taking to increase resiliency to climate change.

The training workshop provided technical knowledge and experience to the National Meteorology and Hydrology Services and Disaster Management Departments in their efforts to adapt national observing networks to address local and community needs. Representatives from CIRDA partner countries-Benin, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Gambia, Liberia, Malawi, Sierra Leone, Sao Tome and Principe, Uganda and Zambia- were also present.

Speaking at the workshop Mr. Richard Muyungi, UNFCCC Focal Point for the Government of the Republic of Tanzania stated, "The capacity to ensure that development planning is instituted on accurate climate information and services is extremely relevant, it is is an objective for which we are glad to work jointly with our UNDP and regional partners."

During the workshop, participants were introduced to various methods for assuring data quality as well as to innovative technologies that are available to enhance data collection. In addition, they were provided with a first-hand account from private sector representatives on the strategic partnerships that can be developed for collecting (Earth Networks), communicating (Access Communications) and employing climate information (ACRE Insurance).

This event also provided an important space for CIRDA partner countries to display the work that they have been developing as a result of national climate information and early warning projects. This included a video displaying Benin's success in implementing its flood warning system.

Click here to access the presentations, country posters and videos from this training event.

Weather Observations. Climate Observations. What is the difference?

Credit: www.easterbook.ca

This is a question that pops up regularly, often times because 30 years ago most experts might have stated that, except for a few important exceptions such as the NOA NWS Cooperative Observer Program, there was essentially little difference. However, today the answer is somewhat more complicated.

As most of us know, weather describes the evolving state of the atmosphere over short periods of time (from a few minutes to two weeks at most) while climate describes the behaviour of the Earth's climate system over long periods of time (from the order of seasons out to years to decades or even longer). In fact the "gap" from two weeks and three months (length of a season) has become a hot topic of current research (but more on that in a future post).

Whereas weather forecasts have only recently come to be expressed in probabilistic terms, climate descriptions have always been in terms of means values (normal's) and probabilities of departure from those normal's (natural variability). Until the last few decades, climatology was largely about analysis to reveal the different types of climate to be found on Earth and research to resolve and understand the often subtle changes in climatic patters on various time scales in the past and at present.

A major change came with the arrival of computing capabilities sufficient to support numeric global-scale climate models, the appearance of both satellite and in-situ ocean observation as well as the finding that the greenhouse gas content of the atmosphere was increasing. A new generation of climatologists became interested in puzzling out the contributions of anthropogenic (man made) activities to climate change and to using numerical models to simulate past climates and predict likely future ones.   

Today, observations from over 11,000 observing stations support operational weather forecasting, air pollution modeling and emergency and military operations, as well as a whole host of industrial and financial applications. Additional data flow in from observations made from balloons and aircraft, buoys and ships at sea, special monitoring systems and a host of satellites.

Many of the stations making primary 3- or 6- hour weather observations (temperature, pressure, humidity, wind speed and direction, precipitation, etc.) are located at airports or in meteorological observatories operated by National HydroMeteorological Services. Such measurements- particularly where supplemented by hourly observations from airports and other locations- are highly useful for resolving synoptic (continental) and sub-synoptic scale events in the atmosphere. In the past, climate information has been extracted from the data produced by these weather observation networks. However, that has now changed.

While modern-day climatologists still use the above mentioned weather observations for many traditional applications, they now need climate-specific observations that provide a much broader range of data (including chemical constituents) to more completely describe Earth's climate. Further, much more extensive observations of the Earth's oceans are required. Such climate observations are in demand not only to monitor the evolution of Earth's climate in a more precise way, but also to validate and verify the numerical models used to predict how Earth's climate system is likely to evolve.

In addition, not all climate observations are the same. The signals that climatologists are trying to tease out of the observational data are quite small and often buried in environmental and sensor noise. Thus, climatologists have developed requirements for climate measurements that are more stringent than those required for weather observations.

On Different Types of Weather Observations: Part II

Source: SA Weather and Disaster Observation Service

Our last post on weather observations dealt with large scale or synoptic observations. However, in recent years driven by the demands of users and advances in research, operational meteorologists have become interested in monitoring weather events at a smaller scale.

Users interested in this type of weather information include farmers, agricultural insurers (agricultural meteorology); drivers of all sorts and traffic managers (road weather); electrical utilities and power grid managers (watershed hydrometeorology and air quality meteorology)

Smaller scale observations
Small scale observations include those conducted at a meso-beta scale of 20 to 200 kilometers. Observations at this scale include phenomena like sea breezes, and lake effect snow storms.

Small scale observations can also be made at a meso-gamma scale of 2-20 kilometers. Phenomena at this scale include thunderstorms (also known as the storm scale), large wildfires, pyrocumulonimbus clouds, fire storms as well as complex terrain flows over or around mountains and urban heat islands.

In contrast to the detailed guidance provided for synoptic and aviation observations, only general guidance is available for observations on these smaller scales. The quantities to be observed, the spatial distribution of the several observing systems (an "observing network") necessary to capture essential details of the phenomena of interest, the frequency at which observations are to be reported and how they are processed and displayed for use vary significantly from application to application. 

As an example, support to agriculture may require observations on a variety of scales from sub-synoptic (regional drought monitoring) to meso-gamma (forecasting pest emergence in fields in a small region). This requires the meteorologist planning observing systems to be creative in terms of instrument selection and exposure as well as in observing network design. Thus, some agrometeorological observations may be at the heights of the plant canopy and taken every hour to monitor crop conditions. Other measurements, such as daily maximum and minimum temperature to estimate growing degree days, may need to be taken only once per day.

On the Different Types of Weather Observations- Part I

Meteorologists and others make many types of weather observations for a wide variety of purposes. Unfortunately, the diversity of types of observations often leads to confusion in discussions about how, where, and when weather observations should be made. With this in mind we decided to write a few posts with a brief description of the types of observations- as noted by a CIRDA Meteorology Expert.

Synoptic Observations

Usually when meteorologists speak of observations, unless they qualify their comments, they are referring to what are termed “synoptic observations”. The term “synoptic” means "affording a general view of the whole". Thus synoptic observations are made to characterize and quantify the weather over a large region at particular moments in time (usually periodically at 3-hour or 6-hour intervals). Each such observation includes data on sky cover, state of the sky, cloud height, atmospheric pressure reduced to sea level, temperature, dew point, wind speed and direction, amount of types of precipitation, and other information on observed atmospheric phenomena. Synoptic observations are reported to the Global Telecommunication System managed by WMO to be shared with meteorologists around the world.

When synoptic observations from across a continent are collected and analyzed, they provide meteorologists a picture of surface weather events occurring on spatial scales of several hundreds to a few thousand kilometers and time scales of a few hours; these are termed synoptic scale events. The large low and high pressure systems and accompanying frontal systems found in mid- and high-latitudes are examples of synoptic scale weather phenomena.

Synoptic surface weather observations are made by trained observers of National HydroMeteorological Services (NHMS) in accordance with guidelines established by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) [see WMO Guide to Meteorological Instruments and Methods of Observation, WMO-No. 8 (2008 edition, updated in 2010) with Corrigenda Table (dated Sept. 2012, published October 2012)]. The Guide specifies in detail how, where, and when synoptic observations are to be made. Given the purpose of synoptic observations, the WMO Guide discusses in detail aspects of the locations where synoptic observations are to be made and how instruments are to be exposed so as to ensure that the observations are comparable and representative of a wide region.

Aviation/Hourly Observations

In addition to observations at the synoptic intervals, many NHMS collect hourly observations at their synoptic sites. In addition, “aviation/hourly observations”, a subset of the synoptic quantities plus other aviation-specific quantities, are made hourly at airfields and at other locations. “Special observations” may also be made when atmospheric conditions change rapidly between hours in ways that may impact aviation or other operations.

For aviation observations, the guidance of both the WMO and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) apply. In accordance with such guidance, the instruments used to make such observations are normally exposed so as to provide data representative of runway conditions, which may be quite different from those observed by a synoptic observation site.

Communicating Climate Information: Graphics

A CIRDA Team Member recently posted an excellent question regarding reaching communities through climate information, particularly when trying to reach a predominantly illiterate population.

An expert available to the CIRDA Team quickly provided real life experience of ongoing efforts in the Philippines to devise a simple and clear scheme that not only communicates climate information but that can also motivate appropriate action.

An example that has been effective to educate communities that live along the rivers in the Philippines has been the use of graphic imaging. For instance, comparing flood levels to the height of popular Philippine boxer Manny Pacquiao. Graphic imaging is able to translate easily to a population familiar with this national sports hero. While people may not know much about hydrology, most will know everything about this world class boxer. Two other examples of "weather iconography" (found below) follow this example of graphic imaging. While some are effective, others may prove to be too complex.   

However our expert was clear in stating that research has shown that one of the complicating factors in having early warning information lead to action is that individuals usually will not take action upon receiving climate and early warning information from just one source. They seek confirmation from other sources, relatives, and local leaders (government officials, police and religious leaders) about the warning and on what actions should be taken.