Tropical Africa’s First Testbed for High-Impact Weather Forecasting and Nowcasting

Abstract

Testbeds have become integral to advancing the transfer of knowledge and capabilities from research to operational weather forecasting in many parts of the world. The first high-impact weather testbed in tropical Africa was recently carried out through the African SWIFT program, with participation from researchers and forecasters from Senegal, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, the United Kingdom, and international and pan-African organizations. The testbed aims were to trial new forecasting and nowcasting products with operational forecasters, to inform future research, and to act as a template for future testbeds in the tropics. The African SWIFT testbed integrated users and researchers throughout the process to facilitate development of impact-based forecasting methods and new research ideas driven both by operations and user input. The new products are primarily satellite-based nowcasting systems and ensemble forecasts at global and regional convection-permitting scales. Neither of these was used operationally in the participating African countries prior to the testbed. The testbed received constructive, positive feedback via intense user interaction including fishery, agriculture, aviation, and electricity sectors. After the testbed, a final set of recommended standard operating procedures for satellite-based nowcasting in tropical Africa have been produced. The testbed brought the attention of funding agencies and organizational directors to the immediate benefit of improved forecasts. Delivering the testbed strengthened the partnership between each country’s participating university and weather forecasting agency and internationally, which is key to ensuring the longevity of the testbed outcomes.

Economic value and latent demand for agricultural drought forecast: Emerging market for weather and climate information in Central-Southern Nigeria

“…A demand-led assessment of the economic value of weather information with the potential for developing an emerging market for public-private partnership investments becomes relevant for policy action. In recognition of these gaps that the partnership between UK and African scientists, through the Global Challenge Research Fund (GCRF) African SWIFT under the Real-Time Pilot Initiative of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) provided a change in the African weather forecasting capability and communication, from hourly to seasonal timescales, to protect lives and livelihoods in Africa, through effective co-production and capacity building while tailoring climate information services to individual needs (Fletcher et al, 2021;Hirons, et al, 2021). The National Meteorological Services and Regional Climate Centres in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Niger, and Senegal provide invaluable expertise to co-develop useable forecast products that can be used to inform effective preparedness for events such as dry spealls, droughts and to support planning decisions in a prevailing weather (University of Leeds, 2021).…”

Impact of land surface processes on convection over West Africa in convection‐permitting ensemble forecasts: A case study using the MOGREPS ensemble

“…We use ensemble simulations based on the operational MOGREPS-G, and a nested, regionally downscaled counterpart based on MOGREPS-UK (Hagelin et al, 2017) with some adaptions for the tropical African domain as described in Cafaro et al (2021) for tropical East Africa. The ensemble forecast trial over West Africa was performed as part of a SWIFT Pilot Testbed (Fletcher et al, 2022) over the period 19th April to 12th May 2019. The nested convection-permitting ensemble (CP-ENS) with a domain centred on West Africa (Figure 1e) was run with 80 vertical levels with a model top level at 38.5 km and at a horizontal grid spacing of 0.08 (8.8 km).…”

“…The African Science for Weather Information and Forecasting Techniques (SWIFT) project (Parker et al, 2022) was an international effort to improve African weather forecasting capacities on time scales from hours out to several months. Within a SWIFT pilot testbed (cf., Fletcher et al, 2022), the UK Met Office for the first time trialled regional convection-permitting (CP) ensemble forecasts for tropical Africa, nested within their operational UK Met Office Global and Regional Ensemble Prediction System (MOGREPS-G Bowler et al, 2008). The CP ensemble (CP-ENS) explicitly captures the convective events that dominate African rainfall, thus, overcoming many issues in the representation of organised convection Crook et al (2019); Martínez and Chaboureau (2018), which plague coarse-scale forecast models that rely on convective parametrisations.…”