Project title: Google African Meningitis Project Goal: Provide weather forecast information to the World Health Organization, Benin Chad, Nigeria, Togo, relevant to vaccinate dissemination decision-making. Sponsor: Google non-profit wing Current and Anticipated Funding –Calendar Year 2009: $230K –Calendar Year 2010: $230K –Calendar Year 2011 $230K –Calendar Year 2012: $210K Participants: –RAL: T. Hopson, M. Hayden, Arnaud Dumont, Mukul Tewari, Raj Pandya (UCAR), Tom Yoksas (UNIDATA) New Opportunities –Utilization of Thorpex-Tigge multi-center ensemble; medium-range disease forecasting

Meningitis endemic in Africa Sporadic large epidemics ( :, 250,000 cases) 5-10% fatality rate 10-20% of survivors have permanent impacts: hearing loss, brain damage, learning disabilities Vaccine in very limited supply Risk = f(Relative Humidity) We can forecast RH & vaccines can be pre-positioned for maximum effectiveness Weekly telecons with WHO, Chad, Nigeria, Togo, Benin on 2-week epidemic outlook Low Risk when Wet High Epidemic Risk when Dry National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Significant Accomplishments to Date -- context and weather linkages

National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Relative humidity across the Meningitis Belt forecast 1 week in advance … … converted to probability of an epidemic alert occurring across the Belt 3 weeks in advance Within dashed region, risk has doubled (above background levels) Significant Accomplishments to Date -- context and weather linkages

Determined weather variables impacting meningitis incidence (RH) Employing Thorpex-Tigge ensemble operationally Providing weekly telecon 1- and 2-wk ahead forecast updates on meningitis belt status to WHO/countries Capabilities Demonstrated -- weekly WHO telecons (today) Today’s telecon 2-week ahead RH forecast (epidemiological week 17) for the ECMWF ensemble mean Comparison with 2011 for the same week … … and the climatological state for the same week

Capabilities Demonstrated -- Africa Decision Information System

Capabilities Demonstrated -- Africa Decision Information System (cont)

World Survey of Climatology, 1972 Climatology of West Africa JanuaryJuly SH SHL Capabilities Demonstrated -- next steps

Archive Centre Current Data Provider NCAR NCEP CMC UKMO ECMWF MeteoFrance JMA KMA CMA BoM CPTEC IDD/LDM HTTP FTP Unidata IDD/LDM Internet Data Distribution / Local Data Manager Commodity internet application to send and receive data NCDC Unique Datasets/Software Created Thorpex-Tigge

Archive Status and Monitoring, Variability between providers

Unique Datasets/Software Created Thorpex-Tigge -- fields

Our application Fitting T quantiles using QR conditioned on: 1)Ranked forecast ens 2)ensemble mean 3)ensemble median 4) ensemble stdev 5) Persistence Additional science … quantile regression

Space-Time Continuum: Where are you? 10 3 m 10 5 m 10 1 m 10 7 m min hourdayseason decade to century Time Scale Spatial Scale Mark with an X where your projects are now and where you anticipate being in the future X

Project title: Assessing the ensemble spread-error relationship

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