Data Services
Climate Database and Archiving services
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Support on the climate database management system
Operational Data Services support operational Long Range Forecast (LRF) and climate monitoring:
Development of quality controlled regional climate datasets, gridded and ungridded including the following elements:
Mean, Maximum and Minimum Temperature and Precipitation at temporal resolution of daily, ten days, monthly, seasonal and annual scale.
Conventional Datasets: These are traditional instrument observational weather records accumulated in meteorological service archives. They are actual point datasets observed, recorded and transmitted globally under the CIMOs, WMO guideline.
However NMHS only shares 137 stations under the WMO Res.40 for exchange of meteorological data and other related products here
CDMS Use
- The upgraded Climsoft V4 is installed to test its performance and stability to fix the remaining bugs;
- This is done following WMO guidelines on CDMS specification here
- Five countries are using while Djibouti and Burundi have requested support to get Climsoft installed in their NMHSs. CDMS status of use in IGAD NMHS
- Plan is underway to install MCH CDMS to manage Hydrological data from AWSsensors installed under the IGAD-HYCOS project within the member states.
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Data rescue support and backup services
ICPAC has been implementing DARE (Data rescue activities) within the Region in collaboration with the development partners. Data Rescue is No 3 on WMO priority list and RCCs like ICPAC are tasked to provide Data Rescue technical support to country NMHSs under their jurisdiction. PREPARED (Planning for Resilience in East Africa through Policy Adaptation, Research, and Economic Development) is a USAID funded project whose original objective was to strengthening climate information generation in the East Africa Community (EAC) Partner States.
It was later realized that they needed long data series for generating climate information to inform decision makers. A decision was then taken to support DARE activity in the EAC countries. ICPAC is working closely with USAID PREPARED project to implement pilot data rescue with TMA (Tanzania Meteorological Agency) .
Development of Regional Climate Datasets
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Development of gridded datasets
BACKGROUND OF SATELLITE DATA (CHIRPS)
The U.S. Geological Survey Earth Resources Observation Science Center (USGS) and University of California, Santa, Barbara (UCSB), Climate Hazard Group developed utilized satellite observations, average precipitation from rainfall stations and rainfall predictors such us elevation, latitude and longitude to build high resolution (0.05x0.05 degree), Africa dekadal and monthly precipitation datasets called the Climate Hazard Group Infrared Precipitation with Global Telecommunication System (GTS) stations (CHIRPS). The datset is available since 1981 to present. The updated CHIRPS dataset can be freely accessed on the website: ftp://ftp.chg.ucsb.edu/pub/org/chg/products/CHIRPS-2.0/
BLENDING GRIDDED DATASETS FOR EAC/IGAD REGION
Further processing to blend station observations with unbiased satellite rainfall estimates was used to produce the 1981 to present CHIRPS for the Greater Horn of Africa region. Approximately 102 stations from the IGAD Member-States, including Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi were used to create high resolution (0.05x0.05 degree) blended, gridded dekadal and monthly precipitation datasets available at ICPAC using GeoCLIM tool. GeoCLIM is a geostatistical tool developed by USGS in collaboration with UCSB and USAID Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWSNET) for climatological analysis of historical rainfall and temperature data, in support of the USAID PREPARED and Global Climate Change activities.
The blending methodology in GeoCLIM utilizes the inverse distance weighting interpolation technique to generate station grids combined with satellite data to produce a new improved dataset, a combination of insitu and satellite data at 5km resolution. The blended data for the EAC/IGAD region has been generated at monthly timescales for the period 1981 to present. This dataset can freely be accessed from the ICPAC website
346 is the number of stations were used in the blending of the EAC Chirps data from 1981 – 2013.
The number of stations which goes into the blending of the GHA/ICPAC Chirps data is 100 stations from 1918 – 2013. GHA Metadata
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Metadata generation and status of accesibilty
Meta data
The station metadata belongs to the IGAD NMHSs Stations which agreed to share data with ICPAC under the WMO Resolution 40 of sharing open source data with the RCCs.
They include Lat. Long. Elevation in meters and the station-id as they are provided from country NMHSs as can be seen in the station distribution map.
WMO naming convection following Lat and Long was used to generate the unique station identification.
These stations send data to ICPAC on a ten day basis via emails.
WMO WIGOS WIS Compliance
The available metadata in the NMHSs is not comprehensives enough to cover all the necessary aspects apart from Long, Lat. Alt, open and closing dates. Member states require training support to compile meta data in WMO WIGOS compliance
Plans are underway to support NMHS compile extensive flexible discovery metadata for information services supporting access and retrieval to authorized users.
An attempt to compile such discovery metadata was done during the TMA DARE Pilot Project
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Development of quality controlled data series for climate monitoring
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Climate normal and standardized anormalies
Quality Assurance/Quality Control of National Datasets
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Support on NMHS on quality assuarance of climate services
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Error detection mechanisms and correction