The SADC Climate Services Centre (SADC-CSC) conducted a training workshop for National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHSs) on Regional Climate Modelling and Monitoring from 17 to 22 June 2019 in Johannesburg, South Africa under the Southern African Regional Climate Information Services for Disaster Resilience Development (SARCIS-DR) Project.

Background
The SARCIS-DR Project aims to improve the core capacities of national and regional climate centre (RCC) to meet the needs of Disaster Risk Management (DRM) agencies and socio-economic sectors for effective use of weather and climate services and community-focused and real-time early warning systems (EWS).
During the scoping mission carried in 15 SADC NMHSs from November 2018 to January 2019, it was found that only five (5) were running climate models. The reason for this anomaly is that Member States lack proper infrastructure to run the Climate Models and lack adequately skilled personnel. The SARCIS-DR Project, as part of its implementation plan will be providing Computer Servers for modelling to Member States, and this training was meant to build the capacity of experts from member states on installation, running of model and analysis of outputs. Building capacity of Climate Modelling Experts from NMHSs on climate change projections using Regional Climate Models will enhance the level of climate change mitigation and adaptation at National level.

The Training Objectives were to:

(i) introduce NMHSs the Principles of Regional Climate Modelling
(ii) build capacity on the usage of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) Regional Climate Model (RegCM)
(iii) build capacity on the visualization of the climate model outputs
(iv) train trainers for the region.

Participation
Experts from the National Meteorological/Hydrological Services from Thirteen (13) Member States attended the training workshop, namely: Angola, Botswana, Comoros, Eswatini, Lesotho, Malawi, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Seychelles, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Outcomes of the training
This training workshop was first ever regional climate modelling training facilitated by SADC and revealed to be a great success as indicated by the feedback from participants. The main challenge was limited time, as downloading data and running climate simulations on laptops requires several days. This was addressed by preparing installation environment (Ubuntu Operating System) and pre-downloading some dataset on cloned external flash disks before the training. The training objectives were met, participants were equipped with the necessary skills to install, run a climate model and visualize/analyse outputs. The Training Material is available for download from the following links:

Training material link
Training material alternative link
Pictures