First AMMA International Conference, Dakar 2005

AMMA's First International Conference was held in Dakar, Senegal, November 28 - December 4 2005.
It included a workshop on impacts the last two days.

Group picture of the Dakar conference participants
Proceedings
Accepted abtracts
Programme with downloadable presentations
Acknowledgements

Conference outline

AMMA first international conference aimed to bring together researchers from around the world working on the WAM and its impacts, to review ongoing research activities and to discuss future contributions and directions within the AMMA research programme. It also provided the first real opportunity for establishing and coordinating collaborations at the international level, and in particular with African scientists. 

Substantial efforts were made to ensure good attendance at the conference, particularly from Africans in the region. Expectations were significantly exceeded with more than 300 abstracts received and 255 participants from 23 countries, including at least 70 Africans. This enthusiasm for AMMA is a strong endorsement for what AMMA is working to achieve.

The conference took place within the enhanced observing period (EOP) and just ahead of the AMMA special observing period (SOP) in 2006. The conference was an ideal occasion to review and discuss the plans for the observing campaign as well as the opportunities for related research activities.

AMMA activities are coordinated through 5 international working groups. These 5 research areas constituted the main themes of the conference. More on the conference themes

Download conference flyer in English or in French

Highlights of parallel working sessions

WG1: West African Monsoon and Global Climate
WG2: Water Cycle

WG3: Land-Surface-Atmosphere Feedbacks

The meeting took place under the assumption that the problematic of the surface atmosphere interaction within AMMA needs to be dealt with first at the fine spatial and short time scale before the knowledge is integrate towards the large scale. The strategy proposed for WG3 is to work progressively from the small scales (or high resolution information over the region) to the broader scales (low resolution representation of the processes). This will allow the study of processes at the small scales and devise methods or conceptual models to represent theses processes at a larger scale or lower resolution. The following key topics were discussed: Surface states, Planetary Boundary Layer, Genesis and evolution of convection, Large scale analysis.

Key Activities that were agreed in the short term included:
o To organize a workshop bringing together the land-surface remote sensing community and the land-surface modelling community involved in ALDAS.
o The potential contribution of AMMA to progress on known issues in the surface/PBL interactions and diurnal cycle in large scale models (GCMs and RCMs) need to be made known. The proposed solution is to apply simple diagnostics on GCM output available in inter-comparison projects (the IPCC data base has a 3 hourly sampled year for all GCMs) and show how poorly these models perform.
o To use the same case study than WG2 to study the surface atmosphere interactions after evaluation the potential to study surface/atmosphere interactions in this case. Once the potential of this case is ascertained experimental designs should be proposed.

WG4: Prediction of Climate Impacts
WG5: High Impact Weather Prediction and Predictability

Funding of the conference and logistical help

The International Organisation team of the conference would like to thank especially the following institutions who enabled the conference by funding participants and / or logistical help during the conference:

The AMMA-EU project (FP6 contract 004089-2) funded the participation of 15 young scientists. The fellowships were awarded to the candidates based on their excellence and with the most promising projects within AMMA. The awarded students and young post docs were involved in AMMA within one of the following institutions partners of the AMMA-EU project: CNRS (France), IRD (France and Benin), UPS (France), IGUC (Copenhaguen), AGRHYMET (Niger), Météo France (France), CNR (Italy), University of Liverpool (UK), EIER (Burkina Faso), UCM (Spain), University of Leeds (UK).

The French institutions (CNRS/INSU, CNES, IRD, Météo-France, IFREMER) participating into the funding of AMMA France allowed the participation of a large number of African colleagues in addition to the funding received from IGAC, DoE (ARM), EU (AMMA-EU), SCAC of the French Embassies Niamey, Senegal, Benin, Mali, Burkina Faso...), UNESCO/CO