Climate Hazards Group of UCSB Hosts 2018 Training Workshops on Web Services for Early Warning Data

The University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) Climate Hazards Group (CHG), a NASA Harvest partner, held two trainings at the end of January and early February in Tanzania and Kenya. The first training, "SERVIR ESA Regional Hydroclimate Services Training Workshop" was held from January 30th to February 2nd, 2018 in Dar Es Salam, Tanzania. The workshop's purpose was to train partners from National Meteorological Agencies and Hydrological Services in web-services to access agroclimate datasets for monitoring precipitation and NDVI. The CHG is working with Regional Centre for Mapping Resources for Development (RCMRD) in Nairobi to host their own instance of the Early Warning Explorer (EWX). These can be applied for preparing seasonal climate scenarios, agricultural drought monitoring, water resources management and index insurance. 

Trainers for this workshop included Harvest partners Greg Husak, Amy McNally, and UMD Hub partner Jan Dempewolf as well as UCSB researchers Shraddhanand Shukla, Sari Blakeley, and Denis Macharia, CHG-collaborator/Weather and Climate lead for SERVIR Eastern and Southern Africa project from the RCMRD. Dr. McNally presented on Famine Early Warning Systems Network Land Data Assimilation System (FLDAS) outputs, and Dr. Dempewolf presented on the GEOGLAM Crop Monitors for AMIS and Early Warning. Post-workshop the participants provided positive feedback on the training, and expressed interest in potentially using web services and the examples of the applications of those web services for decision making purposes.

From February 5th to 8th, Climate Hazards Group held another training, titled, "GeoMod and Hydrometeorological Data for Climate Impact Assessments" in Nairobi, Kenya at the IGAD Climate Prediction and Applications Centre (ICPAC). Members of the CHG trained fourteen meteorological and agrometeorological professionals from ICPAC and nine National Meteorological and Hydrological Services professionals to help them develop projections of precipitation and temperature under climate change scenarios. In doing this, they were also presented with background on Climate Hazards Group Infrared Precipitation with Station Data (CHIRPS), EWX and FLDAS. Exercises blended outputs from EWX and FLDAS, along with projections from Geospatial Model (GeoMOD) to anticipate future water resources. Greg Husak, Amy McNally, Laura Harrison, Gideon Galu, Chris Shitote, and Diriba Korecha all led sections over the course of the three days. "CHIRPS has become the standard," said Guleid Artan, Director of ICPAC. "It was so useful and now I am training my colleagues back home and hope to participate again at any other workshop like this from CHG, FEWSNET, and NASA" stated a GeoMod participant summarizing their experience.