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Titel |
The UCAR Africa Initiative - Overview and Update |
VerfasserIn |
Tom Yoksas, Raj Pandya, Abudulai Adams-Forgor, Patricia Akweongo, Vanja Dukic, Mary Hayden, Tom Hopson, Benjamin Lamptey, Roberto Mera, Sylwia Trazka |
Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2011
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Medientyp |
Artikel
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Sprache |
Englisch
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Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 13 (2011) |
Datensatznummer |
250057691
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Zusammenfassung |
Motivated by the underrepresentation of Africa in international efforts to contribute to and
benefit from improved meteorological and climatological research capabilities and facilities,
The UCAR community, as represented by UCAR-Member and Affiliate universities, NCAR,
and the UCAR Office of Programs, is actively assisting in building and leveraging
atmospheric-sciences capacity in Africa. The UCAR Africa Initiative (AI) builds sustainable
partnerships between UCAR and African institutions in order to pursue research and
applications for the benefit of the African people. The initiative is envisioned as enabling
African Solutions for African Problems.
A pilot effort in the UCAR Africa Initiative focuses on developing, with funding from
Google.org and partners in the U.S. and Africa, a prototype Earth-gauging system
integrating weather and health data to help manage meningitis.
The overarching goal of this project is to contribute to saving lives and enhancing
livelihood in Ghana through integration of health and environmental data, and by using
that integrated data in service of health-related decision-making. Specifically, the
goal is to build and implement a prototype decision-support system that integrates
two- to 14-day weather forecasts and epidemiological data to provide actionable
information that can be used to help contain the spread of meningitis epidemics. By
applying a preliminary economic evaluation of this decision support system, the
potential benefit of using environmental data to improve public health outcomes will be
assessed.
One part of the project focuses on investigating the links between weather and meningitis
and the skill with which global weather forecast centers can predict the end of the
regionally-prevalent meningitis season. Work to date models outbreak severity as a function
of weather variables, and examines logistic and quantile regression approaches for
prediction of meningitis. The current focus is on isolating the most important weather
variables for prediction of outbreak duration. Then, the "global grand ensemble" of the
WMO-initiative THORPEX TIGGE project will be used to forecast those important
variables.
A second effort focuses on understanding the knowledge, attitudes and practices associated
with meningitis in northern Ghana. Comprehensive interviews with over 100 individuals who
have contracted meningitis (cases) and 200 age, gender, and location matched individuals
without meningitis (controls) will allow us to investigate socio-economic factors that
contribute to the spread of meningitis, and help assess the relative impact of environmental
factors, including weather. This comparison will be facilitated by in situ hourly data obtained
from 20 humidity and temperature sensors deployed in a transect through northern
Ghana.
A third effort focuses on developing a technical and social infrastructure that can provide
transparent, reliable, usable weather information to organizations who make decisions about
meningitis vaccination campaigns. Our long-term goal is to support an African institution as
the provider of this information; in the meantime we will pilot this in the U.S. using Unidata’s
TDS, RAMADDA and IDV software packages.
These three efforts are a small piece of an overall Google.org effort to develop an
Earth-gauging System that will integrate environmental, health and development data into
products that stakeholders and researchers can use to monitor variables, analyze trends and
identify relationships among different variables. The Earth-gauging System will support the
prediction of emerging threats, and provide the basis for an robust early-warning
system that will improve health, food security, and development and conservation
outcomes.
This presentation provides an overview of the various efforts being conducted and planned as
part of the UCAR African Initiative and gives a status update of efforts currently
underway. |
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