2015 CM SAF Training Workshop in Pretoria

Participants of the CM SAF Training Workshop 2015 in Pretoria

Under the motto „The Use of Gridded Satellite Data for Climate Services in Africa” the Satellite Application Facility on Climate Monitoring (CM SAF) carried out from 8 to 12 June 2015 for the first time a training workshop in Africa. The workshop was hosted by the South African Weather Service (SAWS) in Pretoria.

From more than 80 applicants 21 participants from 13 different African countries were chosen. The goal of this workshop was to present the data and possibilities of CM SAF and to teach the handling of the data with hands-on exercises.

For the workshop the CM SAF developed and provided a toolbox basing on the open source software R. The participants could present their results also to the WMO CCI Task Team on the Use of Remote Sensing Data for Climate Monitoring (TT-URSDCM), which met a the same time in Pretoria. The final presentations of the participants showed for instance the spatiotemporal variability of solar irradiance and cloud coverage in Nigeria and Benin, trend analysis of global radiation for Ghana, the assessment of extreme events or the agricultural potential in Uganda as well as station-based evaluations of CM SAF data for the Seychelles, Egypt or South Africa.

Via the CM SAF Community Site and the corresponding course forum a lively exchange about data and services of CM SAF and the software for data processing took place in the run-up to the workshop. Via this webpage many more information about CM SAF and the R-toolbox are available.