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A plan for monitoring Africa's weather
As climate change makes the developing world even more vulnerable to natural disasters, developed countries extend a global partnership for sharing satellite images.
By Scott Baldauf | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the December 5, 2007 edition
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Cape Town, South Africa - When a massive earthquake shakes some corner of the Pacific Ocean, sensors alert Pacific Rim nations of possible tsunamis. When massive downpours converge on the nations of Central America, satellite imagery and computer modeling helps those nations to prepare for possible floods.
But what about Africa? This vast continent of 53 nations has been struck so often by natural disasters – from drought to flood to disease – that the continent is all-too-often synonymous with cataclysm.
While such disasters will continue, technological help from the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) – a partnership of 72 nations that share satellite imagery and other remote sensing information – will soon give African nations a leg up when it comes to managing natural emergencies. At a meeting here on Nov. 30, GEO members agreed to expand the group's operations from the Americas and Europe into Africa.
The expansion comes at a critical time. As climate change makes itself felt around the world, no one is more affected than Africa's 800 million citizens. Any opportunity to prepare for and mitigate the effects of extreme changes in climate can help nations prevent droughts from becoming famines, heavy rains from becoming floods, and an outbreak of disease from becoming an epidemic.
"We are at the confluence of a number of events," says Vice Adm. (ret.) Conrad Lautenbacher (ret.), the US undersecretary of Commerce for oceans and atmosphere, and one of GEO's co-chairs. "We have computing capabilities to produce worldwide models," he says. "We can observe what's happening with sensors on the ground and in space. And communication technology has opened up the world, so that we can move this information around quickly."
With the expansion of GEO, the US and other developed countries have agreed to share satellite imagery and computer modeling to suggest what may happen up to three months into the future. The data and computer models would cover not just weather patterns, but also likely conditions for the spread of diseases such as malaria, for shifts in human population, and even for changes in air quality.
Africa's contribution, for the time being, will be to share ground data with GEO member countries while they build their capacity to conduct more sophisticated weather forecasting and analysis.
"Capacity building is so crucial," says Daniel Irwin, a NASA scientist and project director of SERVIR (the Spanish acronym for Regional Visualization and Monitoring System). Satellites cannot do the work alone, he adds. "This is a genuine partnership. We provide satellite data, and they go out and collect field data, and we create a value-added product. Now we get information to be part of the decision-making process."
