Operational Predictions of Extreme Events in Africa and Decision Support Services

Weather and climate forecasts are essential for socio-economic development. Governments and communities need access to real-time forecast information at all time scales to reduce devastating impact of extremes events, especially floods and drought. In this presentation, we describe an impact-based forecast system targeted to decision making in food security. The system is based on the monitoring of the recent past climate anomalies throughout the rainfall season and outlooks into the near future about one week to a season. A wide range of data and tools are used to highlight areas that are vulnerable to food security. These include remote sensing data for an assessment of current climate conditions and the forecasts of rainfall and temperature on sub-seasonal and seasonal time scales. The latter two are examined to assess the impact of climate on crops and pastures and hence on food security. For illustration purposes, two examples are used in this presentation: (1) the case of the floods in the Greater Horn of Africa in the spring of 2018 with emphasis on the performance of the NCEP model to predict the events; (2) similarly, the North American Multi Model Ensemble (NMME) forecasts are examined in the predictions of the Southern Africa’s severe drought in 2015-16. The dissemination of the information and how it is used in food security analysis is discussed.