Project title: Google African Meningitis Project Goal: Provide weather forecast information to the World Health Organization, Benin Chad, Nigeria, Togo,

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

(1996-1997:, 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 humidityacross the MeningitisBelt forecast 1 weekin advance …

… converted toprobability of anepidemic alert occurringacross the Belt3 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)

Capabilities Demonstrated-- Africa Decision Information System (cont)

Capabilities Demonstrated-- Africa Decision Information System (cont)

World Survey of Climatology, 1972

Climatology of West Africa

January July

SHSHL

Capabilities Demonstrated-- next steps

Capabilities Demonstrated-- next steps

Archive Centre

Current Data Provider

NCAR NCEP

CMC

UKMO

ECMWFMeteoFrance

JMAKMA

CMA

BoMCPTEC

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 CreatedThorpex-Tigge

Archive Status and Monitoring, Variability between providers

Unique Datasets/Software CreatedThorpex-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?

103 m

105 m

101 m

107 m

min hour day season decade to century

Time Scale

Sp

atia

l Sca

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Mark with an X where your projects are now and where you anticipate being in the future

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Project title:Assessing the ensemble spread-error

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