Publication update

Two papers have been published:

Caminade C. and L. Terray (2009) 20^th century Sahel rainfall variability as simulated by the ARPEGE AGCM and future changes. Clim. Dyn., published online, DOI:10.1007/s00382-009-0545-4

Assan J., Caminade C. And F. Obeng (2009) Environmental variability and vulnerable livelihoods: Minimising Risks and Optimising opportunities for poverty alleviation. Jour. Int. Dev. 21(3), 403-418. DOI:10.1002/jid.1563

Regional Climate Model validation for impact modellers

A short validation of the RCM European runs performed within the ENSEMBLES RT3 framework is now available. This is carried out for key impact variables (Rainfall, 2m Temperature, Minimum and Maximum temperatures) for both the control and SRESA1B scenario experiments in order to highlight the model performance in reproducing the observed climate.

http://sites.google.com/site/rt3validation/Home

Climate informations relevant to Humanitarian Future Programme

Following the exchange between UNILIV /CAFOLD and HFP
a website in which we list a collection of sites that may be of use for humanitarian agencies and future adaptation plan has been created. This site is being developed as part of the HFP following interaction with agencies including CAFOD. This includes link to seasonal forecasts, climate scenario information and datasets, training, tools and tutorials.
This is not a definitive list but a selection and a point to start the discussion that will be updated in real time.

http://sites.google.com/site/hfpclimateinfo/

Cafod / King's college / UNILIV meeting 06-07/04/09

Here are the links and documents we discussed about during the meeting:

1) The presentation associated with the LUCIA team in Liverpool: here

2) Usefull links concerning various documents and operational forecasts:

UNDP climate change coutry profiles
These country-level climate data summaries were prepared with funding from the UNDP National Communication Suport Programme (NSCP) and the UK government Department for International Development (DfiD) in order to address the climate change information gap for developing countries by making use of existing climate data to generate a series of country-level studies of climate observations and the multi-model projections made available through the WCRP CMIP3

Various websites for which you can find weather / seasonal forecasts over Africa and over part in the world

The ACMAD website (mainly in french) and the associated monthly bulletin here

GFS forecast system outputs (from the COLA website): here

NOAA CPC African Desk: here

IRI seasonal forecasts and various products over Africa: here
The map room root: here
Browse the IRI website there are usefull informations available here

3) Usefull journal / publications links

CLIVAR exchanges.

AMS Weather, Climate and society


4) The different tools we discussed about (usefull for post-grad students) and other usefull links:

The climate explorer developed at KNMI is a powerfull tool to perform climate related studies and complex statistical analysis on the data. This tool only requests an internet connection and a browser. A short tutorial for climate health related studies is available here

The NCAR portal, allowing to analyze datas, perform statistic analyses and lots of things.....
really easy to use (just push buttons....)
http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/PublicData/getpage.pl

Share your pc for climate simulations.....
http://www.climateprediction.net/

edGCM : simple Global Climate model (an older version of the NASA model) for education and training, it allows to setup climate simulation (scenario, paleoclimate sim....), to visualize the outputs (Eva interface) and to write papers
Really usefull for students and can be installed under windows.....
http://edgcm.columbia.edu/

IDV: 3D real time visualization soft. Really usefull to impress people during the conferences....
Can acces real time forcecast of the GISS model via the web (a catalog can be accessed to by URL)
Read both grib and netcdf files......
http://www.unidata.ucar.edu/software/idv/

AMMA WP3.4 website

The new version of the AMMA WP3.4 website has been released: here
Informations about the ongoing research, data portals, disease modelling and analysis tutorial
are now available.
This website is the deliverable 3.4c for the AMMA project.

Update of the ENSEMBLES RT6 webpage

An update of the RT6 ENSEMBLES webpage has been done: here
The template has changed
The "news" section has been updated
A section Document and Download has been added.
In this section the RT6 partners can find informations on how to access the datas
(few shell scripts are uploaded to retrieve the files). Few documents and usefull links concerning
various climate data portals and freeware to perform the analysis are available as well.

Validation of ENSEMBLES/DEMETER seasonal forecasts over the Sahel: Intraseasonal features

EMS conference in Amsterdam (29/09 - 03/10/2008)

The Sahel is the region of the globe which has experienced the most severe drying, from 1970 to 2000, with dramatic social and economic impacts. As a consequence, forecasting rainfall over West Africa at seasonal time scales became essential regarding to impacts in terms of food, health and security managements since the 1970’s.
One of the aims of the recent initiated AMMA (African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analysis) project is to improve the prediction of the West African Monsoon (WAM) system and its impacts on West African nations. In parallel, within the European DEMETER and ENSEMBLES projects framework, a well-validated European coupled multi-model ensemble forecast system for reliable seasonal to interannual prediction has been developed. Coordinating studies on seasonal prediction between ENSEMBLES and AMMA participants became obvious from the first AMMA/ENSEMBLES meeting that took place in Bamako, Mali.
Thus, in this paper we propose to both validate ENSEMBLES and DEMETER seasonal forecast simulations over the Sahel, with respect to different reference observation data sets during the monsoon period (from July to September) for a common period (1991-2001). An overview of the performance of the different models participating in the projects in capturing the mean features of the WAM, as well as of the multi-model hindcasts is achieved using typical indices, maps, determinist and probabilistic scores commonly used in seasonal forecast studies. Preliminary results highlight common rainfall bias as simulated by coarse resolution GCM, namely overestimation of precipitation over the high mountains (Ethiopia plateau) and underestimation over the low ones (Cameroon mounts, Senegal coast). Other common bias (similar to the ones highlighted in the CMIP3 IPCC coupled simulations) can be shown for relevant SST areas (which are strongly related to rainfall interannual variability over the Sahel), namely a warm bias over the Gulf of Guinea and the ENSO (eastern Pacific) region. Based on a perfect model approach, rainfall potential predictability (PP) is estimated. Strong rainfall PP values can be shown over the Guinea Coast whereas the predictability is relatively weak over the Sahel. Moreover, the model rainfall forecasts seem to be more skilful over the Guinea Coast and the tropical Atlantic Ocean than the Sahel.
The Impact Studies community (agriculture, health....) have expressed a significant need in terms of forecasting intra-seasonal features of the WAM (onset date of the monsoon, occurrence of dry spells during the rainy season...). The performance of DEMETER/ENSEMBLES hindcasts in reproducing these features will be investigated with respect to both ERA40 and NCEP reanalysis.
Similarities and divergence points between DEMETER and ENSEMBLES hindcasts system performance over sub-Saharan Africa will then be discussed as a conclusion. A discussion will also be done about the selected time period. Namely, is 10 year model climate meaningful to build significant statistical results (mean, variance, etc) over the Sahel? Development strategies to improve the model scores will be suggested as perspectives.

Associated presentation:
EMS2008_caminade.v2.pdf