Technical Narrative This U.S.-Kenyan collaborative research project involving Florida State University and University of Nairobi, is in the general area of climatology and numerical weather prediction. Project funding will enable travel and a four-month site visit at Florida State for the co-investigators, Dr. T.N. Krishnamurti (Forida State) and L.J. Ogallo (University of Nairobi), to prepare an Atlas of Recent African Climate, covering the period 1979-1990. This effort will expand and update an Atlas recently published by the co-PIs that covered the climate of the continent over the five-year period 1980-1984. The data for each of the 144 months for the following variables will be processed: tropospheric winds, temperature, humidity, geopotential heights, sea level pressure, sea surface temperature, vegetation index, rainfall distribution and the field of the outgoing longwave radiation. The Atlas will include sections on data quality, data validation, data analysis and detailed sections on the interpretation of the monthly mean fields, anomalies and intra-seasonal and inter- annual variability. Once completed, the data sets will all reside on diskettes and tapes and will become available to young scientists at the University of Nairobi. This project in climate modeling fulfills the program objective of advancing scientific knowledge by enabling experts in the United States and Kenya to combine their expertise and pool research resources to improve the ability to predict severe droughts and to monitor climate change.
