IRI Seminar - Enabling Better Climate Services for African Development Needs: Ethiopia's Experience

Speakers: Madeleine Thomson, Senior Research Scientist; Tony Barnston, Chief Forecaster, Climate and ENSO Forecasting, Outreach Training; Tufa Dinku, Associate Research Scientist; Rémi Cousin, Staff Associate, Data Library; International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), The Earth Institute, Columbia University

The Earth Institute's International Research Institute for Climate and Society presents a seminar: "Enabling Better Climate Services for African Development Needs: Ethiopia’s Experience".

Abstract:

Building resilience against the negative impacts of climate and maximizing the benefits from favorable conditions will require the design and implementation of effective climate risk management strategies. This cannot be accomplished without the availability of decision-relevant climate information. Lack of availability and access to climate information has been a major challenge to using climate information for redevelopment in Africa. Thus, addressing this problem is critical for integrating climate into development planning and practice in Africa. The IRI has designed and implemented a three-track approach of simultaneously improving data availability, access and use in Ethiopia in collaboration with the National Meteorology Agency (NMA). This work has had three major outputs:

1. Improved data availability by combining all available station data from the national network with locally calibrated satellite estimates, resulting in 30-year time series rainfall and temperature for every 10 km grid across the country.
2. Improved access through IRI Data Library installed at NMA, allowing query, visualization and downloading of products in different formats.
3. Improved use of climate information through strengthening the capacity of the health community to understand and use existing and new information products.
   

Different aspects of this project, including plans to replicate this in other countries in Africa, will be presented and discussed at this seminar.

This talk is open to the Columbia University community only.

For more information:

http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu

http://iri.columbia.edu

Sponsors: IRI