Dr. Shrad Shukla (PI, UCSB), Dr. Greg Husak (co-PI, UCSB), and Dr. Chris Funk (co-PI, USGS/UCSB) of the Climate Hazards Group at the Department of Geography have been recently awarded ~$600K by NASA-SERVIR for a three-year project titled "Enhancing Eastern and Southern Africa climate services by increasing access to remote sensing and model data sets."

 

The primary goal of this project is to support informed agroclimate decision-making (e.g. Food Security related decisions) by local and national stakeholders in East Africa and Southern Africa by enhancing the climate services of the SERVIR-Eastern and Southern Africa hub (Regional Center for Mapping and Resource Development (RCMRD, http://www.rcmrd.org/), located in Nairobi, Kenya.

 

RCMRD's climate services will be enhanced by (i) improving the access of the RCMRD to NASA and FEWS NET (http://www.fews.net/) datasets (earth observations, models, and forecasts) and web-services while (ii) expanding the RCMRD's training capacity and ability to better (a) prepare and train their partner institutions (such as the IGAD Climate Prediction and Applications Center (ICPAC) and the SADC Climate Services Centre (CSC), and the meteorological agencies) and (b) serve local and national stakeholders in their decision-making needs. Through this enhanced capacity, the hub will improve environmental management and resilience to climate change by strengthening the capacity of governments to integrate Earth observation information and geospatial technologies into development decision-making.

 

The other Co-I/Collaborators on this project include Daniel Osgood (IRI), Denis Macharia and Michael Kimani Ngugi (RCMRD), Jason Roberts (NASA MSFC), Gideon Galu, Chris Shitote, Tamuka Magadzire (FEWS NET) Abdourahman Houmed-Gaba Maki (ICPAC), Faka D. Nsadisa (CSC), as well as CHG's Pete Peterson (Scientific Programmer), Greg Ederer (Scientific Programmer) and Sari Blakeley (Graduate Student Researcher).

 

This story was also picked up by Noozhawk and can be read here. It was also announced in the University of California News Bulletin here.