David Grimes
TAMSAT Project, Dept of Meteorology, University of Reading, UK
05 May 2009, 3:30 PM
National Weather Center, Room 1313
120 David L. Boren Blvd.
University of Oklahoma
Norman, OK
Directions to the NWC (.pdf, 60 kb)
Humanitarian response to droughts and famine in Africa is often delayed because of a lack of hard evidence of the extent of crop failure in regions with poor communications and technical infrastructure. The time taken to gather sufficient data to make an assessment from ground-based observations may be three months or more. A big step forward can be made by coupling satellite-derived rainfall estimates to a crop-yield model. However a crucial questions are:
• how accurate are the rainfall estimates integrated over an area?
• how does uncertainty in rainfall feed through to uncertainty in crop yield given that the processes are highly non-linear?
One way of addressing this issue is to use the satellite information to generate an ensemble of rainfall fields. The pdf of the rainfall over the crop growing area then represents the uncertainty and the individual ensemble members can be input to the crop model to generate an uncertainty on the final yield.
The details of the approach will be described as will its use with seasonal rainfall forecasts.
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