The East Africa Hazards Watch - Meeting the growing need of risk Information due to increasing climate extremes

The East Africa Hazards Watch is an online web platform that supports tracking extreme events such as drought, cyclones, pests (desert locust), heavy rainfall, floods or crop failures, which are increasing in frequency and intensity due to climate change in East Africa.

About 90% of the disasters in East Africa are due to weather, climate hazards, leaving the region to be one of the most vulnerable to extreme events. Considering the high dependency of the economic systems in the region on natural resources, the impacts of weather and climate extremes have far-reaching socioeconomic consequences. To protect the population against these hazards and to support the resilience of the local communities, there is a dire need for efficient early warning systems and actionable information for decision making. The East Africa Hazards Watch was developed to fill this gap.

The system aggregates risk information from different specialized systems and presents them in one platform. The main goal of the new system is to collect, store, and analyze risk data from different sources and present it in a color-coded system indicating a different level of alert and urgency.  This public regional multi-hazards watch system aims at providing decision ready information, to support transnational coordination and early action across borders. 

Forecasting and Monitoring Components

• Weather Forecast data - Presents weather forecasts of total rainfall, heavy precipitation and temperatures in weekly, monthly and seasonal timescales, generated at ICPAC.
• Drought Monitoring - The East Africa Drought Watch is a near-real time system that uses Earth Observation and Weather information to monitor drought conditions in the East Africa region. It contains drought-relevant information such as maps of indicators derived from different data sources (e.g., precipitation measurements, satellite measurements, modeled soil moisture content)
• Agriculture and Rangelands Monitoring - Every 10 days, the system generates automatic warnings about low or delayed vegetation performance at province level plus weather and Earth Observation vegetation indicators
• Food Security Monitoring - ICPAC produces a monthly bulletin on the state of food security in the region using Integrated Phase Classification (IPC). This information is presented in a color-coded system that reflects the state of acuteness in each impacted area in the region
• Climate Change - Presents temperature variation during the past years for the region, showing the warmest years in the record and how the trend is doing in the past years. Also includes climate change projections until 2100
• Time Series Analysis - The system allows users to click at any point on the map and get time series analysis charts that show the trend for the past time periods for the different enabled layers.
• Impact and Vulnerability analysis - For some layers like heavy rainfall forecasts and Drought indicators, the application provides information about the population that might be affected by the hazard for any selected location. 

The system also allows to overlay hazard layers with other socio-economic and infrastructure data. This enables identification of infrastructure like schools and health facilities that are at risk of being affected by an impending hazard.