Creating an Operational End-to-End Early Warning System Infrastructure in Guinea (West Africa)

An effective early warning system is critical to disaster risk reduction empowering individuals and communities to respond in a timely manner to a variety of weather and climate induced hazards. In the United States and a few other developed countries, significant investment over decades has resulted in robust early warning infrastructures. In least developing countries the situation is entirely different, where many countries have little or no infrastructure to provide visualization or alerting of impending severe weather events. Earth Networks is working to assist developing countries design and implement early warning system infrastructures enabling monitoring and advanced warning of severe weather for the first time in many of these countries. Earth Networks' Early Warning System (EWS) provides a cost-effective integrated approach, ensuring timely, accurate delivery of warnings and forecast information. The EWS enables the National Meteorological Services (NMS) to monitor and provide advance warnings using integrated observational and total lightning data. Earth Networks Total Lightning Network (ENTLN) provides in-cloud and cloud-to-ground lightning detection from compact sensors that are deployed on mobile communication towers and integrated with automatic weather stations (AWS). Total lightning data from the ENTLN is then used to create a low cost radar-like display, PulseRad and Dangerous Thunderstorm Alerts, used for severe weather and precipitation monitoring and alerting. Additionally, weather and lightning data is integrated into ENcast for high resolution weather forcasts providing thunderstorm probability forecasting. Visualization is provided using StreamerRT, a real-time decision support tool. Earth Networks has implemented this end-to-end capability as part of a demonstration program in an African Least Developed Country (LDC) environment in a joint effort with the National Department of Meteorology of Guinea. This talk will detail the implementation, operation, and results of the demonstration program.