Google Africa Initiative

Project Description

Unidata, in collaboration with sister UCAR entities and a few external institutions, is involved in a project called the Google Africa Initiative Meningitis Project. Unidata's role in this initiative is to employ Unidata technologies in the collection and dissemination of data relevant to the project. Packages being used actively are: LDM, IDV, RAMADDA, THREDDS, and McIDAS ADDE.

The UCAR Africa Initiative is motivated by the fact that Africa's future development and quality of life will be greatly enhanced by improving weather data, human resources in the sciences, weather forecasts, and insights about the impact of climate-change.

Three initial endeavors, focused on West Africa and the Sahel, are a response to the Initiative's goals:

• the development of a modest radar network and data-distribution system for a few countries in the Sahel,
• initiation of a partnership among UCAR, the Ghana Meteorological Agency, and the Ghana university community to develop an operational Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model for West Africa, and
• the organization of a workshop in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso from April 2-6, 2007, where the theme of the workshop was 'Improving Lives by Understanding Weather'.

These efforts support the overall Initiative goals of building capacity in the areas of meteorological observing systems, data distribution, human resources related to atmospheric sciences and information technology, and numerical weather prediction.

Project Collaborators

The Unidata Program Center is collaborating with the following entities on the Google Africa Initiative project:

Programme SAAGA in Burkina Faso

Meteorological Services in Mali and Burkina Faso

University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR)

National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)