CPC FEWS-NET / MFEWS / AFN Introduction

The International Weather and Climate Monitoring Project at NOAA's Climate Prediction Center is an extension of an earlier USAID Famine Early Warning System program which originally covered only Sub-Sahelian Africa. The project has now grown to encompass all of Africa, Afghanistan, Central America and the Caribbean, the Mekong River Basin, and much of southern Asia. Work is underway to create a global weather and climate monitoring program to address any international region where humanitarian support is needed. The goal of the program is to provide weather and climate related information to users within USAID as well as international partner organizations, such that a greater level of humanitarian assistance may be offered. The goal is only accomplished through constant interaction with our partner groups such as the USGS, NASA, Chemonics, USAID, and local African organizations. A more thorough and accurate analysis of conditions is possible via these collaborations.

In particular, though USAID is the parent organization for our work in each region, Africa, Afghanistan, and Haiti monitoring is within the FEWS-NET program, Central America monitoring is within Mesoamerica FEWS (MFEWS), and southern Asia monitoring falls within the Asia Flood Network (AFN) program.

The backbone of the project at the CPC has been the provision of daily precipitation estimates at a relatively high resolution for the areas covered including Africa, western, and southern Asia. These rainfall estimates use satellite inputs as well as ground based rain gauge data to return a product more accurate than each individual part. To better grasp the current hydrometeorological situation, climatological data is also used.

Weather Hazards Assessments for each region are created weekly and disseminated to any interested users. These assessments attempt to provide the end user with a forewarning of any weather or climate related phenomena which may eventually impact food security.

The use of Geographic Information Systems within the CPC FEWS-NET program is growing, with nearly half of all products converted to GIS format. The recent surge in GIS data requests does hint that this is a wise move forward. A cyclone monitoring project has used these techniques to disseminate warnings and positional data to a wide array of users.

Many other routine products are created within the CPC FEWS-NET/MFEWS/AFN group, most of which are available from the internet source which this document is located.