German-Ethiopian SDG Graduate School CLIFOOD – Subproject: Seasonal forecast of weather extremes for improving food security

The Horn of African economy and food production are highly dependent on rain-fed agriculture and pastoral systems. Therefore the region is strongly vulnerable to extreme weather events, namely extreme anomalies in the seasonal rainfall, as well as climate anomalies. Precipitation seasonality is complex in East Africa because of large-scale climatic drivers (e.g., the ITCZ) and regional factors such as the presence of lakes, topography, and the maritime influence. These effects influence amount, distribution, onset and cessation of the precipitation including extreme events.  A reliable prediction of rainfall in advance of the rainy season would have enormous social and economic benefits to the countries dependent on rain-fed agriculture. However, current global seasonal forecast systems are of a too coarse resolution to forecast high-impact weather at local scales. Therefore, it is common to downscale the global model outputs over regions of interest.

Here a convection-permitting ensemble of seasonal simulations are performed with the Weather research and Forecast (WRF) model downscaling the SEAS5 (ECMWF’s seasonal forecasting system) data of 2018 over the Horn of Africa. The results are evaluated with respect to the skill to simulate precipitation, temperature and humidity. This project also includes a study of the added value of the high-resolution downscaling effort to enhance farmers agricultural practice optimization, risk assessment and early warning systems.

This subproject is part of the CLIFOOD project which is part of the Food Security Center.