{"access":"Forecasters and researchers in West Africa can apply for access to real-time data by contacting the UKCEH nowcasting team.  nowcasting-portal@ceh.ac.uk.  Data more than 7 days old can be viewed without the need to log in","capabilities":"Nowcasting in West Africa Portal is a web-based data explorer.  Nowcasts for storms are produced every 15 minutes, out to 6 hours and have an hourly timestep.","description":"The purpose of the Nowcasting in West Africa Portal is to enable forecasters in West Africa to provide communities with earlier and more reliable warnings about large storms.\n\nThe portal aims to provide rapidly updated probability nowcasts of convective structures (cores) occurring over the next 6 hours during the summer monsoon (July to September) in West Africa.\n\nA nowcast of Flood Risk over Dakar is also provided for 22 communes across Dakar.","fundingSources":"Nowcasting in West Africa portal was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council as part of the UKCEH’s Land Air Water International Science (LAWIS)  National Capability programme.","id":"6fd21688-62cd-4bb8-859c-ba0ea4099e86","infrastructureCategory":{"value":"data","description":"Environmental data and information","infrastructureClass":"Digital infrastructures","uri":"http://vocabs.ceh.ac.uk/ri/data"},"lifecycle":"UKCEH scientists are continuing to work with forecasting services in West Africa to increase the advance warning time and its reliability by combining more factors influencing storm behaviour within their nowcast modelling, in addition to land surface temperature. These include soil moisture, atmospheric humidity, wind conditions and the amount of rainfall there has been in preceding days.\n\nAs part of a collaboration with ANACIM (L’Agence Nationale de l’Aviation Civile et de la Météorologie), the national meteorological service in Senegal, UKCEH has also developed short-term forecasts of potential flood impacts and risk in Dakar which are available on the portal. It also hopes to work with other forecasting services to provide this service for other areas.","metadataDate":"2025-04-11T12:14:45","onlineResources":[{"url":"https://africa-hydrology.ceh.ac.uk/nowcasting/","function":"website","type":"OTHER"}],"owners":[{"displayName":"Steve Cole","organisationName":"UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology","organisationIdentifier":"https://ror.org/00pggkr55","role":"owner","email":"enquiries@ceh.ac.uk","address":{"city":"Wallingford"},"fullName":"Steve Cole"}],"partners":"ANACIM (L’Agence Nationale de l’Aviation Civile et de la Météorologie), the national meteorological service in Senegal.","resourceIdentifiers":[{"code":"https://catalogue.ceh.ac.uk/id/6fd21688-62cd-4bb8-859c-ba0ea4099e86"}],"scienceArea":"Hydro-climate Risks","title":"Nowcasting in West Africa Portal (part of the Hydrology in West Africa Portal)","type":"infrastructureRecord","uniqueness":"State-of-the-art weather forecast models struggle to predict where new storms will hit and how strong they will be, which makes it difficult to provide warnings to people in affected areas so they can protect their property and livestock or get out of harms way. \n\nNational forecasting agencies in Africa can already make predictions of how storms will behave in the next couple of hours by observing current atmospheric conditions, and analysing hundreds of historical storms. \n\nNow, thanks to a recent breakthrough by UKCEH scientists, they can make these short-term forecasts, known as ‘nowcasts’, for six hours ahead and with a higher degree of accuracy.\n\nNational forecasters can interpret the data and make localised forecasts, sending out warnings to people in areas that are expected to be hit by a storm. Last year, as part of a trial of the nowcasting tool, forecasters in Senegal used it to issue a severe weather warning to the public via text message.\n\nNow, thanks to a recent breakthrough by UKCEH scientists, they can make these short-term forecasts, known as ‘nowcasts’, for six hours ahead and with a higher degree of accuracy.\n\nNational forecasters can interpret the data and make localised forecasts, sending out warnings to people in areas that are expected to be hit by a storm. Last year, as part of a trial of the nowcasting tool, forecasters in Senegal used it to issue a severe weather warning to the public via text message.","uri":"https://catalogue.ceh.ac.uk/id/6fd21688-62cd-4bb8-859c-ba0ea4099e86","users":["Forecasters and Researchers in West Africa"]}