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
WG4: Prediction of Climate Impacts

WG5: High Impact Weather Prediction and Predictability

This WG is concerned with improving our knowledge and understanding of high impact weather over the West African continent, downstream tropical Atlantic and the extratropics. Those attending the conference were mainly concerned with the West African region and most of the discussion reflected this. In the plenary session many talks were provided by West African forecasters on current forecasting techniques. The parallel discussion session was organized along 4 themes important for WG5 (i) Tailoring and evaluation of forecast products for users in tropical regions; (ii) Impact of additional observations and especially radiosoundings over West Africa in analysis/forecasting systems for (a) West Africa, (b) Atlantic and USA and (c) Europe; (iii) Targeted observations in tropical regions and (iv) Societal impacts.

Strong contributions to the WG5 activity are being made by the AMMA forecasting group; in particular through the dry run that is concerned with evaluating forecasting methods and products for 2 weeks in 2005 (22nd August - 2nd September). Also, we have received enthusiasm from several NWP centers to interact with and contribute to the operational activities in WG5 (e.g. ECMWF, Meteo-France, NCEP, NRL, UK Met Office).

Key Activities that were agreed in the short term included:
o Continue to evaluate the forecasts during the dry run period and to provide documentation on the various activities related to this on the WG5 webpages.
o To continue discussions with WG4 on the utility of the ensemble prediction system (EPS) in the West African region and to consider establishing training courses to support their use.
o Establish and coordinate what the various NWP centers will contribute to regarding observing system experiments in AMMA (including the dry run).
o Establish and coordinate the contributions to work on targeting observations.
o An e-mail list will be established to help with communication between interested parties. Also, an WG5 newsletter will be produced and the WG5 webpages developed. A contribution will be made for the AMMA-International Newsletter.
o A workshop in 2007 is under consideration.

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