1. Africa Programs

2. Burkina Faso infrastructure Radar installation on top of control tower and King Air B-200 and hangar facilities at the airport in Ouagadougou

3. Mali

4. Weather radar and project locations Radar locations Burkina Faso and Mali radar locations. Local weather services and universities

5. Radar pictures of West African squall line

6. Real-time data Bamako, Mali http://www.rap.ucar.edu/projects/westafrica/bamakorada rdata/images/BamakoDbz/CP_BamakoDbz_BAMAKO_ 20061003163600.png

7. Recent Work Unstable and unreliable internet and local area network at the Programme SAAGA offices in Ouagadougou. The network and internet connections went down several times during the day and once for a period of 24 hours. The problems were associated with wiring problems, router and firewall problems and not necessarily with the internet connection as such. The network and internet connections in Bobo Dialloso were found to be highly reliable and working fine. The problems in Ouagadougou could also be associated with frequent power outages at the Programme SAAGA office during my one-week stay. Unstable power supply and frequent power outages at the Programme SAAGA offices in Ouagadougou. Although a standby generator is available for power supply when normal electrical power outages occur it always took 30 seconds to a minute to change from normal to standby power. The UPS units that supply power to the radar and TITAN/CIDD computers during this transition are small and on days when several of these power outages occurred the UPS batteries were drained and were not able to continue to provide power to the computers and equipment. This resulted in systems losing power and rebooting after power was reinstated. This also resulted in loss of data.

8. Africa Initiative Proposal Activities Finalize implementation of radars and software (Current funding) Provide expert in networking to evaluate and help design reliable network (New funding, travel and support, 1 month) Network Mali and Burkina Faso radars and potentially MIT Niger radar (new funding, software engineer, 1month) Stream data to UNIDATA (new funding, 1 month per year software engineer, UNIDATA)

9. Proposal Activities (cont.) Burkina Faso has recently purchased two EEC C-band radars. As part of a sub-contract with EEC, NCAR is already working with Burkina Faso to provide upgraded software for one of the radars. Propose to upgrade the two C-band weather radars by providing a new receiver with Doppler capability including analysis software (1 month radar engineer, 1 month software engineer, hardware (~50k). Education and training (3 people from Burkina Faso and Mali will visit NCAR for training, current funding; GLOBE, COMET, UCAR E&O, START, ASMET, etc?) Workshop in Fall or early winter in West Africa (Sahel other west African countries using existing networks).