Under the auspices of the Gore-Mbeki agreement, a framework for economic development between the United States and South Africa, the U.S. - South African BiNational Commission (BNC) was established to oversee and sponsor collaborative efforts mutually beneficial to both nations. In the field of agriculture, an important BNC project has been the
USDA-Oklahoma Mesonet Initiative, a joint collaboration between governmental agencies and universities within South Africa and the United States.
South Africa's Institute for Soil, Climate, and Water (ARC-ISCW), an institute of the Agricultural Research Council, maintains and operates an observation network that is critical to the interests of agriculture. It does not, however, currently employ state of the art methodologies in the areas of data collection and dissemination. A project now underway at ARC-ISCW calls for the automation and expansion of the existing network with particular attention paid to data-sparse areas of the
former homelands. The second focus is to reduce the time lag between measurement and availability to users.
The USDA-Oklahoma Mesonet Initiative provides a framework for ARC-ISCW to upgrade their existing sites and install new ones to adequately represent South Africa's diverse climate zones. By adopting desirable qualities of the Oklahoma Mesonet and proven technologies from within USDA, the South Africans hope to realize their goal of a single, fully automated climate monitoring network. Data and technology exchanges by meteorologists, database and instrumentation specialists, and Cochran Fellows are presently underway. Plans for 1999 include additional exchanges and training workshops for analysts and technicians. The long term goal of the participants is for a fully functional, multi-national network for collecting and sharing mesoscale weather observations. This project would serve as a model for future collaborative efforts between international weather bureaus.