Programme

Download updated conference programme

Updated conference schedule (July 15 2009, 375 Ko pdf file)

Instructions to presenters of posters and talks  Instructions sur la présentation des posters et communications orales

Conference themes

Three main themes have been selected together with a few sub-themes highlighting the topics to be covered in the conference.

Predictability of the West African Monsoon Weather, Climate and Impacts

This theme is concerned with exploring the predictability of the West African monsoon system at a range of space and timescales relevant to society. This includes consideration of such things as high impact weather at daily-to-medium range timescales, wet and dry spells (including monsoon onset) at intraseasonal timescales, and wet and dry years and decades at interannual-to-decadal timescales. The theory and prospects for rapid climate change in the region will also be considered. As well as evaluating dynamical and statistical models used for prediction, particular emphasis should be given to highlighting the processes that give rise to this predictability including the key feedbacks that operate. Within this theme we also invite presentations and discussion on present and future prediction strategies for weather and climate in the region, that includes the spectrum of relevant timescales highlighted above as well as emerging impacts-oriented prediction tools.

• Evaluation of processes and feedbacks in regional and global models
• Evaluation of biases and predictability in statistical and numerical models
• Prediction of the African monsoon from days to decades
• Climate change projections
• High impact weather prediction
• Emerging impacts-oriented prediction tools

Scientific committee: C. Thorncroft (Co-Chair), A. Boone, K. Cook, A. Diongue-Niang, A. Giannini, W. Hazeleger, A. Kamga, P.M. Ruti, S. Trzaska

Society Environment Climate Interactions

West African populations, mainly rural, are particularly concerned with climate variability since it affects the availability of water resources, food supplies and income with direct consequences for public health and for services provided by the ecosystems. The challenge for the AMMA programme now is to pull-through our increased understanding of the West African monsoon and how it impacts societies and ecosystems towards initiating and facilitating future investigations on interactions between societies, their environment and climate (ISEC). We require an interdisciplinary approach that is focused on the interactions between West African societies with the environment as well as sustainable observation networks and field surveys to support this effort. Approaches related to the large diversity of social and human sciences as well as related to biological sciences (such as the ecosystem dynamics, health, etc) should emerge and be coordinated within a new programme.

• Natural and water resources, agriculture and livestock: climate and socio-economic constraints and opportunities
• Health, environment and social vulnerability
• Vulnerability and adaptive strategies of African societies facing African monsoon variability and climate change
• Policies for climate change mitigation and management of renewable resources in African countries

Scientific committee: D.E. Da, A.H. Dia, L. Genesio, V. Hien, H. Karambiri, O. Pliez, L. Somé, B. Sultan, O. Touré, A.K. Traoré, S.B. Traoré

West African Monsoon System including atmospheric, oceanic, hydrology and biophere Processes

A better understanding of the WAM, as a coupled oceanic, atmospheric and continental system, will be beneficial for weather and climate forecasting and the management of impacts. This requires a better knowledge of the WAM processes from local to regional scales, and to improve their representation and their integration in models. This includes water and energy cycles, surface-atmosphere feedbacks, emissions, transport and transformation of trace gases and aerosols, and scale interactions. This enables also to address the two-way interactions between the WAM and the rest of the globe for determining the WAM variability and its global impacts from intraseasonal to multi-decadal time scales (seasonal cycle and monsoon onset, nature and role of teleconnections, tropical cyclones, aerosol variability and atmospheric chemistry). The conference will provide the opportunity to share the evaluation of the progress made during these last years and to identify the gaps where effort should be put in the coming years.

• Water and energy cycles
• Cycles of aerosols and gas phases
• Land surface-atmosphere feedbacks
• Atmosphere-ocean interactions
• Monsoon variability and abrupt changes at all scales
• Teleconnections
• Tropical cyclones

Scientific committee: S. Janicot (Co-Chair), B. Bourlès, C. Flamant, A. Konaré, C. Peugeot, C. Reason, C. Reeves, C. Taylor

Conference programme up

The different sessions will promote multidisciplinary approaches to address the geophysical and societal dimensions of AMMA's major scientific objectives. Mornings will be dedicated to plenary sessions accessible to a wide audience and will include solicited and contributed oral presentations. In the afternoons, parallel sessions will be dedicated to more focused issues and to discussions. Special emphasis will be given to poster sessions which will be used to motivate discussion in the conference. The poster exhibition will be installed all week long to host more focused sessions.

Languages up

English and French are the conference languages. Abstracts and presentation slides will be required in English. Oral presentations will be given either in English or in French.