This award supports 20 participants (10 US and 10 African) in the US-Senegal Workshop on West African Monsoon Variability and Predictability, to be held in Dakar, Senegal, May 1999. Additional participants include 10 from the United States, nine from Africa, and two from Europe. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is providing support for six of these US participants and four of the African participants. The co-organizers are Drs. Wassila Thiaw, of the American Meteorological Society, and Kerry Cook, with the Atmospheric Science Program at Cornell University, and Professor Simeon Fongang, of the Laboratoire de Physique de l'Atmosphere at the Ecole Superieure Polytechnique of the University Cheikh Anta Diop in Dakar. This multidisciplinary workshop will include research scientists, meteorologists, and modelers.
In West Africa, as elsewhere in the world, the regional monsoon system has a major impact on human activities, farming practices, and economies. An extremely heavy rainfall can cause devastating floods, while too little rain can reinforce the desertification process. West Africa has been under a drought condition since the 1960's, but little is known about the its monsoon system's characteristics, its interactions between the easterly waves, or its associated cloud systems. Through a re-analysis of data sets from the National Centers for Environmental Prediction and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCEP-NCAR), as well as data derived from satellites, the current information on how West Africa's climate operates will be benchmarked, expanded to include large-scale influences, and assessed to determine its current and future predictive capabilities. The workshop will foster interactions among and between US and African scientists and modelers, and the resultant projects will help increase the current knowledge about and predictive capabilities for West African precipitation variability. This grant will support the participation of three graduate students and one young researcher from the United States, and one African graduate student. The Division of International Programs and the Division of Atmospheric Sciences are jointly supporting this workshop.
