Enhancing National Climate Services for Development in Africa

The ENACTS (Enhancing National Climate Services) initiative is an ambitious effort to simultaneously improve the availability, access and use of climate information by working directly with national meteorological and hydrological services. It enables these agencies to provide enhanced services by overcoming the challenges of data quality, availability and access – while at the same time fostering stakeholder engagement and use.

By integrating ground-based observations with proxy satellite and other data (e.g. reanalysis and digital elevation models), ENACTS products and services introduce quality-assessed and spatially complete data services into national meteorological agencies to serve stakeholder needs. One of the strengths of ENACTS is that it harnesses all local observational data, incorporating high definition information that globally produced or modelled products rarely access. The resulting spatially and temporally continuous datasets allow for the characterization of climate risks at a local scale , and potentially offer a low-cost, high impact opportunity to support applications and research.

ENACTS has so far been implemented in Ethiopia, Madagascar, Tanzania (including Zanzibar), Zambia, Rwanda, Ghana, Mali and The Gambia at national levels, and at regional level for the CILSS countries (West African Sahel). The ENACTS initiative strengthens policy analysis, relevant for multiple sectors, by providing relevant data with national coverage with much greater accuracy at smaller spatial and temporal scales. The climate products developed through ENACTS (which include a historical time series, routine monitoring and forecast products) are disseminated in “Maprooms” via the web sites of the national meteorological agencies using the powerful IRI Data Library software http://iridl.ldeo.columbia.edu . Products are currently being tested for use in impact assessment and forecasting in agriculture, health and disasters.