Improving Climate Data Management in Africa

Friday, 24 July 2015

L-R: James Gallagher (SSC Director), David Mills (SSC), Ian Watkins (UK Met), Albert Mhanda (Zimbabwe Met), Jens Riede (German Met Service), Samuel Machua (Kenya Met), David Stern (SSC) and Rafael Posada (German Met Service).

A Statistical Services Centre (SSC) team, headed by Professor Roger Stern, have hosted part of the next major set of improvements to the CLIMSOFT climatic data management system.

The CLIMSOFT software is designed to support the data entry, quality control and management of the historical climatic records that are held by the NMS (National Meteorological Service) in each country.  These include daily records of rainfall and other climatic elements as well as the more detailed data from automatic weather stations.  CLIMSOFT has been developed almost exclusively within Africa, with support from the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the UK Met Office. It is currently used by over 20 countries in Africa and elsewhere, and the number is likely to increase substantially with the new version .

Two of the original developers of the software, Albert Mhanda (Zimbabwe Meteorological Service Department) and Samuel Machua (Kenya Meteorological Department), spent four weeks at the SSC. During that time representatives from the UK Met, WMO (Training and Fellowships Division) and the German Met Service visited the centre reflecting growing interest in the R programming work done by the SSC for analysing historical climatic data.

The SSC has involved UoR's Walker Institute, TAMSAT (Tropical Applications of Meteorology using SATellite data) from the Meteorology Department and the School of Agriculture, Policy and Development in meetings during this period to show-case the University's climate related work in international development.

Roger Stern said "We are delighted that the University of Reading, through the Statistical Services Centre, is making important contributions to the development of appropriate software for climatic data management, and we thank the UK Met Office for their continued support."

At the conclusion of the visit, Albert Mhanda said:

"We thank the Statistical Services Centre for hosting this important meeting for starting the development of the core of the next version of CLIMSOFT, which is intended to be open source.  What we have achieved, during this visit, has gone beyond our expectations.  Simultaneously, the visit has opened up opportunities for potential collaboration with University of Reading partners in the TAMSAT group and the Walker Institute.

Finally, I would like to thank the UK Met Office for their continued support."

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