Development of a Low-cost Precipitation Observation Network in Africa

Accurate and reliable real-time monitoring and dissemination of observations of atmospheric and hydrologic conditions in general is critical for a variety of research and real-time monitoring applications.  Precipitation observations provide critical information for wide variety of applications ranging from drought monitoring for agriculture application and resource staging in extreme drought regions to water resource monitoring for freshwater allocation and hydroelectric power generation.  In many regions of the World, especially in Africa, weather observation network density has been declining over the past few decades.  The University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) with support from USAID, is leading an initiative to develop low-cost hydrometeorological instrumentation (e.g., automatic weather stations, rain gauges, stream gauges) as solution to increase observation networks in sparsely observed regions of the world. We have started a new initiative to use low-cost observation network to support the Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET: https://fews.net/). The goal of the project is to improve the number of observations (temporally and spatially) in these regions to improve the quality of the FEWS NET products.  These data will be open and publicly available to the scientific community for other applications (e.g., satellite precipitation product evaluation, weather and hydrological prediction, etc.).  The presentation will provide an overview of the low-cost observation technology and plans for the development of the precipitation monitoring network in Africa.