International relations: The Ucar Africa initiative

The overarching goal of the UCAR AI is to enhance opportunities for African scientists to perform research on problems relevant to their continent. The initiative is motivated by the fact that Africa has been underrepresented in international efforts to improve research capabilities, observing facilities, operational forecasting, and meteorological education. This is in spite of the fact that sub-Saharan countries are especially vulnerable to weather and climate variations, and that Sahelian weather directly impacts the United States in the form of hurricanes and dust clouds. Thus far, we have focused on UCAR's own capacity for enhancing and providing access to African observations, especially radar data and high-resolution models. The radar data and the final analyses and forecasts from the operational WRF model, as well as the availability of other data through UNIDATA, are designed to provide much needed data and infrastructure for African researchers. We hope that this paper demonstrates UCAR's capacity to contribute to atmospheric science research in Africa, and we hope the outlined pilot efforts will provide a springboard for collaboration with universities and other organizations. In the future, we will focus on facilitating informal and formal collaborations between U.S. and African atmospheric scientists, including facilitating visitor exchanges and fostering productive mentoring and training for early and pre-career scientists in Africa. While UCAR would participate in these efforts, we see our primary role as enabling partnerships between universities and programs in Africa that seek to develop new research capacity and universities with relevant research programs. We offer this paper, in part, to initiate a dialogue about these possibilities.