By Delia Gutiérrez. Posted March 11, 2016

The first Conference was held in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Spain) in 2007. It has been followed by the conferences in Niamey (Niger) in 2008, Banjul (Gambia) in 2010, Sal (Cape Verde) in 2011 and Boadilla (Spain) in 2012.

The VI AFRIMET Conference will be held in Nouakchott, Mauritania, between 19 and 21 April.

The Conference’s main objective is the work of all of the countries together, therefore making it easier to detect problems and adopt decisions.

Provisional agenda 
Useful information

By Delia Gutiérrez. Posted January 20, 2016

The workshop was held in Abidjan ((Ivory Coast), from 23 to 27 November 2015, with participation of representatives of the meteorological services of the 17 participating countries (16 countries members of the Conference AFRIMET and Chad) together with WMO and AEMET.

The METAGRI pilot project was launched in 2008 in the context of the programme of cooperation AFRIMET of AEMET and WMO. Funded by AEMET, 160 educational roving seminars were held until 2011, and about 3500 raingauges were distributed among farmers from the 16 countries members of the Conference AFRIMET. The second phase, METAGRI OPS, has being mainly funded by the Government of Norway, through WMO, although the AFRIMET program was still linked to the project and offered some support. From 2012 to 2015, 260 new seminars have been held, and more than 4500 rain gauges have been provided to the farmers of the 17 participating countries. Technical training has also been provided to the meteorological services, and the encounter with the media for the dissemination of meteorological information has been fostered.

During the workshop the successes, difficulties and lessons learned have been examined, and the lines of work of the new METAGRI SERVICES project have been outlined. The new project will be submitted to the next Conference of Directors AFRIMET which will soon be convened.

More information can be found on the webpage of the workshop,

https://sites.google.com/a/wmo.int/metagri-2015/

By Delia Gutiérrez. Posted December 02, 2015

This meeting, organized by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the World Health Organization (WHO), the United Nations Programme for the Environment (UNEP), the European Agency for the exploitation of meteorological satellites (EUMETSAT) and AEMET, was held in Amman (Jordan), from 2 to 5 November, with the participation of representatives from the fields of meteorology, the environment and the health of 16 countries, together with international experts.

AFRIMET’s HEALTHMET pilot project has joined the initiative with the participation of representatives of the meteorological services of the two countries that have already launched their national Climate and Health Working Groups (CHWG), Mauritania and Burkina Faso.

The meeting has focused on assessing the state of knowledge on the subject, and on promoting measures to tackle the problem of pollution by mineral dust from the sanitary point of view.

The Healthmet project has been presented at the meeting. This pilot project, which aims to strengthen links and cooperation between the meteorological and health services in the countries involved, launched in 2011 the national CHWGs in Mauritania and Burkina Faso. After a period of inactivity, in 2015 the project is has approached the ClimHealth Africa initiative and the joint office WHO/WMO of the MMSC. Participation in this workshop is intended to be the takeoff of the re-launch of the CHWGs and the implementation of activities aimed firstly to evaluate the data and available resources and needs, on the way to the establishment of early warning systems for health services.

Spain leads the world prediction of dust and sand storms through the first operating center in the world recognized by the WMO. The Barcelona Dust Forecast Center (BDFC), created in February of 2014, produces and distributes daily predictions of atmospheric mineral dust for North Africa, Middle East and Europe. The Center is managed by AEMET and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC). These predictions are essential to establishing national early warning systems allowing the mitigation of the adverse effects of mineral dust.

During the workshop, the city of Amman lived an exceptionally intense episode of airborne dust. Data and forecast were discussed at the meeting.  

You can find the presentations of Mauritania, Burkina Faso and HEALTHMET at AFRIMET documents’ archive.

 By Delia Gutiérrez. Posted Juny 24, 2015

Organized by World Meteorological Organization (WMO), World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) and State Meteorological Agency of Spain (AEMET). More information here

By Delia Gutiérrez. Posted Juny 24, 2015

The Sahelian belt is known to be a region where atmospheric levels of suspended mineral dust are among the highest observed on Earth. In the framework of the African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analysis (AMMA) program, a transect of 3 ground based stations, the Sahelian Dust Transect (SDT), was deployed in order to obtain quantitative information on the mineral dust content and its variability over the Sahel. The three stations, namely Banizoumbou (Niger), Cinzana (Mali) and M’Bour (Senegal) are aligned around 14◦N along the east-westward main pathway of the Saharan and Sahelian dust towards the Atlantic Ocean (Marticorena et al., 2010).

Find more information here.

By Delia Gutiérrez. Posted February, 2015

On February 4, framed in the sixteenth session of the Regional Association I WMO held in Praia, Cape Verde, a meeting of the members of the Conference of Directors AFRIMET was held. In it, an assessment of the status of this cooperation program AEMET -which was warmly acknowledged by all partners- was presented.

During the act, AEMET introduced the new program coordinator. Members of the conference were summoned to a new meeting on the occasion of the future VI Conference of Directors, to be convened for this year 2015

Find in our archives the synthesis document on the status of the AFRIMET program