DATA RESCUE IN AFRICA: SYNERGY WITH NATIONAL AND REGIONAL PROJECTS Climate&Environment Department ACMAD International Workshop on the Rescue and Digitization of Climate Records for countries in West Africa November 2012, Accra, Ghana

- Historical Background - ACMAD plans for African Data Rescue& Management - Proposed support to other DARE projects in Africa - Concluding Remarks OUTLINE

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND With funding from Belgium, WMO sent experts in 46 African countries to locate and image hydromet data Microfiches of over 30 millions old observations from about 1000 sites were produced with copies to countries Microfiches were handed over to ACMAD around the mid 90s Discussions with IEDRO and recently with IRI at Columbia University for imaging and digitalization Call for bid and selection of a firm to procure data rescue equipments and related training at ACMAD ( Aug-Oct 2012)

Training of ACMAD/country experts on scanning of microfiches, creation of images library, data keying and entry into the national and continental databases Inventory, scan all microfiches ( about 100 thousands) and save as digital images Key in the data and enter them into the ACMAD/Regional Climate Centres African climate database ACMAD DATA RESCUE PLANS

Provide on the job training on data rescue at ACMAD for countries Countries data Rescue with seconded experts and visiting scientists programmes at ACMAD Each country expert will bring back a copy of digitized Data in a Climsoft managed database interfaced with application tools ( RCLIMDEX, CPT, Excell, GIS macros…) for climate monitoring and forecasting products Organize workshops to produce climate indices, Atlases and other added value products using rescued data ACMAD DATA RESCUE PLANS ( support to country and sub- regional DARE projects)

DEVELOPMENT AND USE OF THE CONTINENTAL CLIMATE DATABASE AT ACMAD Data base design and architecture Ingestion of Daily Data Ingestion of Synoptic data Curent status of the Data base

DATA BASE DESIGN AND ARCHITECTURE Data model is the model for CLIMSOFT version 3, which was last updated in 2010 Data model allows storage of different data formats: numeric, text, Boolean (Yes/No) and graphical images Though originally designed in MS Access, the database design has been ported to MySQL and PostgreSQL. It can be ported to any other RDBMS. For the ACMAD climatological database, the open source PostgreSQL was chosen for its efficiency, stability and robustness. PostgreSQL data storage capacity is on the order of Terabytes (TB).

INGESTION OF DAILY SYNOP DATA CLIMSOFT ingest GTS data via FTP. The data are automatically imported into the CLIMSOFT database at a scheduled time. This module for the ingestion of synoptic data became operational in June 2012.

Current Database Status Historical daily data from the NOAA/NCDC FTP site date back to GTS SYNOP data imported from GTS data reception system at ACMAD. Total database size is approximately 24 GB Very Basic QC is carried out. We are planning to implement more rigorous Quality checks.

PROVISION OF FORMATED DATA FOR CLIMATE OPERATIONS Table of 10-day summaries for selected stations for all Africa input to dekadal Bulletins Data output in RClimDex, CPT and Instat inputs formats. We have plans to include other outputs in formats required by any climate application tool

Long-term climatological means generated for all GTS stations in Africa. Climatological means available for the period , , , Data products in XML format and can be viewed with any web browser

RCLIMDEX and INSTAT input data format from Chad climsoft Database at ACMAD

Multiple key entry for countries data using on the job training, secondment and visits on data rescue to reduce possible errors Continue development of CLIMSOFT for station data by building interfaces with the web, application tools, other environmental database management systems as well as GIS software Expand CDMS training across Africa integrated into workshops for generating value added information for climate data