Projects and cooperation in developing countries

The Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) has a number of activities with the main goal of providing developing countries with the best possible knowledge on various aspects of climate, including future climate change and its impacts.

We aim to help build local capacity by providing and assisting in analyzing regional climate change projections. An essential part of our activities is also training and educating local staff. We provide training and education through internal and external courses, targeted training activities are undertaken at the DMI and local staff is educated at institutions in Africa.

The Danish Climate Centre (DKC) is presently involved in climate projects in Tanzania and Zambia as well as the 15 member states of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) in southern and eastern Africa.

Focus areas

Regional Climate Modelling

Global Climate Modelling

Ozone, UVR and Climate

Ice Sheet Modelling

Processes in the Arctic

Developing Countries

Climate Data Host

Projects in Zambia

DMI has established a twinning project with the Zambia Meteorological Department (ZMD) with the project: Capacity development for climate change at the Zambia Meteorological Department. The goal is to enhance ZMD’s capability in the fields of climate variability and change in Zambia.

This is achieved by enhancing ZMD’s capacity in climate monitoring and climate modelling as well as in the dissemination of weather and climate products. By this, ZMD will be better prepared for providing weather and climate related information and services to the public as well as to both governmental and non-governmental stakeholders.

The project includes a number of different initiatives. The existing observation network will be improved and the workshop at ZMD will be upgraded in order to ensure a good spatial coverage and a good selection of meteorological parameters. The data management and data analysis techniques will be improved.

Furthermore, climate data gridding techniques will be introduced at ZMD. Simulations with a regional climate model will provide regional climate projections for Zambia. Finally, ZMD’s website will be improved and a website will be implemented at ZMD’s regional office in the Southern Province for disseminating climate products to the agricultural sector.

Meteorological stations, Choma, Southern Province (left) and Lusaka International Airport (right) in Zambia. Photos: John Cappelen

DKC is responsible for the overall coordination of the project. DKC performs regional climate simulations for Zambia and provides data from these simulations to ZMD. Moreover, DKC trains ZMD’s staff in using these data and educates ZMD’s staff on various aspects of both present-day and future climate and climate modelling.

Finally, DKC assesses the quality of the regional climate simulations for Zambia and the future changes in various aspects of the climate in Zambia based on these simulations. The project runs from November 2009 to December 2012 and is supported by the Royal Danish Embassy in Lusaka, Zambia.

The CLIVET project in Tanzania

The DKC participates in two Danida-funded projects in Tanzania. The CLIVET project (Impacts of Climate Change on Water Resources and Agriculture – Adaptation Strategies in Tanzania) is a 5-year capacity building project which is coordinated by the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS).

The objective of CLIVET is to contribute to the capacity development in Tanzania in order to encounter the impacts of climate change and to develop strategies to adapt to these changes, in particular in relation to water resources.

This is achieved by building individual and institutional capacities to do climate change research, to assess adaptation strategies and to build north-south climate change research alliances. The Tanzania Meteorological Agency (TMA) and the Universities of Dar es Salaam and Copenhagen are also project partners.

CLIVET is divided into three work packages. One dealing with the prediction of climate changes in selected river basins in Tanzania (WP1, led by DKC), one with the analysis and prediction of water resources in one of these basins, the Rifiji-Ruaha basin (WP2), and one with devising adaptation options in cooperation with the local people (WP3).

Since the overall aim of the project is capacity building and to increase the research capacity in Tanzania, a Ph.D. and a M.Sc. will result from each of these work packages.

The main role of the DKC in CLIVET is to project climatic changes on a regional scale in Tanzania and to train the staff from Tanzania in setting up a climate change simulation. This includes running it, post-processing the output and analyzing it.

We will compare four model simulations: one forced with ERA-Interim data from 1989 to present, and one following the downscaled A1B scenario for selected time slices in the period 1950-2100, both in the CORDEX standard resolution of 44 km and in a 10 km resolution, focusing on Tanzania and the surrounding countries.

Sea level pressure (contour lines, increment 2 hPa, lowest contour in the Strait of Mozambique 984 hPa) and rainfall (shaded, colour bar). A day in March in the HIRHAM5 10 km high-resolution simulation of present-day climate and in very good accordance with observations. Each season (December to March) two to four of these tropical cyclones make their way through the Strait of Mozambique, dumping typically 200 mm of rain per day. Maximum wind speeds can reach 35 m/s

Apart from conducting these climate simulations, we support the project work by guidelining and assessing the overall quality of the analysis and by arranging education and training activities in Denmark and Tanzania.

Climate change in the Kilimanjaro region

In another Tanzanian project, Monitoring the environment of the Mount Kilimanjaro region and its association with climatic changes, we cooperate with the Sokoine University of Agriculture in Morogoro and the Tanzanian Meteorological Agency.

As in CLIVET, one of our staff members acts as supervisor for a PhD student at Sokoine University.

Mount Kilimanjaro taken from an altitude of 11000 m and a distance of 40 km from a north-east direction, on 16 August, 2009. Even though the “season of long rains” has just ended, there is almost no ice on the summit. Photo: Martin Stendel

This project aims to use a high resolution version of HIRHAM5 to assess the mesoscale atmospheric features, in particular the moisture dynamics, of the Mt. Kilimanjaro region atmospheric dynamics under present-day and future climatic conditions. As a consequence, we may be able to relate these variables to the retreat of glaciers from the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro and the consequences for e.g. agriculture further downhill.

The study will cover the complete annual cycle for HIRHAM simulations in two resolutions, other models and two sets of reanalyses, and it is enhanced by automatic weather stations which have been installed at three different levels on the western flank of the mountain. This will add new observational data, since up to recently, there was only an automatic station at the crater located at the top of the mountain.

Such an assessment is particularly interesting because Mt. Kilimanjaro has long been regarded as an “icon of climate change” - even though we know that the glaciers are in fact not disappearing because it is too warm.

A groundwater vulnerability index for South Africa

The DKC is also involved in another African project, which is funded by the World Bank on behalf of the Southern African Development Community (SADC), which consists of 15 countries in southern and eastern Africa (Angola, Botswana, Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia,Seychelles, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe).

The aim of this project is to construct a groundwater vulnerability index for the entire SADC region. Naturally, such an index consists of a multitude of layers, both non-meteorological, such as population density, groundwater aquifer productivity or distance to the next surface water, and meteorological.

DKC stands for the latter part, and an index has been developed which allows us to calculate the meteorological groundwater vulnerability, based on average annual precipitation and its variability as well as length and intensity of drought periods.

Meteorological groundwater vulnerability for the SADC region based on average precipitation and its variability and an analysis of drought periods of different severeness. The index allows to assess for present-day vulnerability (shown above) as well as (from climate model data) future changes in vulnerability

Contacts

Project coordinator Zambia project, Wilhelm May wm@dmi.dk
phone: (+45) 39157 462

Project coordinator Tanzania and SADC projects, Martin Stendel mas@dmi.dk
Phone: (+45) 39157 446