
Representatives from across the CORDEX Africa community came together for the first scoping workshop of the next phase of CORDEX-Africa Analysis Workshops in Johannesburg on 26th & 27th May 2015. This workshop series follows on from a highly successful first series, which has led to 9 peer reviewed journal articles authored by members of the African regional teams. The workshop was funded through a combination of support from the Swedish Secretariat for Environmental Earth Systems Science (SSEESS), WCRP and SMHI.
The goals of this first scoping workshop were to: reinstate the regional teams and also initiate the new Central Africa regional team; identify key regional research questions; develop or adopt appropriate methodologies to address these; and to discuss how to engage the user community. The focus of this meeting was to provide context from the wider CORDEX and international strategy, provided by participation of the IPOC Director and ICSU representative, and to set the research agenda of the workshops to follow and thus only included senior regional team members.A number of participants who were unable to join physically connected through Skype for key discussion sessions.
The workshop was highly successful resulting in a list of clearly defined research questions to be addressed by each of the regional teams, a publication plan initiated, training and infrastructure requirements highlighted, and a plan for effective liaison with end users and other relevant programmes and initiatives. Funding is now being confirmed for the next two workshops to take place during Autumn 2015 and early 2016. Details from the meeting can be found on the CORDEX-Africa website.
For further information contact CORDEX Africa point of contact Chris Lennard, CSAG, UCT.
From left to right: Grigory Nikulin (SMHI, Sweden), Francois Engelbrecht (CSIR, South Africa), Chris Lennard (UCT, South Africa), Daniel Michelson (SMHI, Sweden), Genito Maure (Universidade Eduardo Mondlane, Mozambique), Vincent Ajayi (Akure Federal University of Technology, Nigeria), Sarah Osima (Tanzania Meteorological Agency), Eleanor O’Rourke (IPOC), Wilfried Pokam (University of Yaounde, Cameroon) and Daniel Nyanganyura (ICSU African Regional Office, South Africa)