The Southern Africa Development Community (SADC), through the SADC Climate Services Centre (CSC) held the Twenty-fourth Southern African Regional Climate Outlook Forum (SARCOF-24), virtually, on 27 to 28 August 2020. This year, SARCOF-24 process was a collaborative effort between the SADC Climate Services Centre, with funding from the Intra-African Caribbean Pacific (Intra-ACP) Climate Services and related Applications Programme funded by the 11th European Development Fund (EDF), and other partners.  

The SARCOF meetings were being conducted virtually as follows:

• Climate Experts Meeting (pre-SARCOF-24): 10 to 26 August 2020; and
• Dissemination of the SARCOF-24 products: 27 to 28 August 2020.

Documents from the Forum are available from the links below:

Statement from the SARCOF-24  [EN]  |   [FR]

Climate Early Warning Advisory Note

The Southern African Development Community (SADC), through the SADC Climate Services Centre (CSC), is organizing the Twenty Third Southern African  Regional Climate Outlook Forum (SARCOF-23), at the Hotel de Convenções de Talatona (HCTA), Talatona, Luanda, Angola, from 28 to 30 August 2019. The objective of the Forum is to disseminate the seasonal rainfall and temperature forecast/advisory for the upcoming seasons (October - December 2019, January to March 2020) . The theme for this year is “Understanding the Earth System to build resilience against recurring extreme weather and climate events in SADC region”. Delegates are kindly requested to register in the Forum Registration Form on the link below.

Further information is provided in the official announcement and related documents below:

 SARCOF-23 Full Announcement  [480kb]

 Draft Programme - SARCOF-23 Forum [480kb]

 Official Opening Ceremony Programme [157kb]

 SARCOF-23 Information Note [400kb]

  Forum Registration Form

The Twenty Third Southern Africa Regional Climate Outlook Forum (SARCOF-23) 

The Twenty Third Annual Southern Africa Regional Climate Outlook Forum (SARCOF-23) was held in Luanda, Angola from 28th to 30th August 2019 to present a consensus outlook for the 2019/2020 rainfall season over the SADC region.  The forum was preceded by a Climate Experts Meeting on 19-27 August 2019, hosted by the Instituto Nacional de Meteorologia e Geofísica (INAMET), for climate scientists from the SADC National Meteorological and Hydrological Services to formulate this Outlook. The full statement and early warning advisory are available at the links below:

 SARCOF-23 Statement [1.2Mb]

 Climate Early Warning Advisory Note [1.1Mb]

Other documents from the forum are available at the following link:

 ftp://cscftp.sadc.int/sarcof23

Climate Experts Meeting, 19-27 Aug.2019	Official opening by Hon. Mininister of Telecommunication & Information Technology of Angola, Dr Jose Carvalho da Rocha	Media address by the Director General of the Instituto Nacional de Meteorologia e Geofísica (INAMET) of Angola, Mr. Domingos Jose do Nascimento

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