Africa Programs

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Africa Programs
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Burkina Faso infrastructure
Radar installation on top of control tower and
King Air B-200 and hangar facilities at the
airport in Ouagadougou

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Mali
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Weather radar and project locations
Radar locations
Burkina Faso and Mali radar locations.
Local weather services and universities
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Radar pictures of West African squall line
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Real-time dataBamako, Mali
http//www.rap.ucar.edu/projects/westafrica/bamako
radardata/images/BamakoDbz/CP_BamakoDbz_BAMAKO_200
61003163600.png
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Recent Work

• Unstable and unreliable internet and local area
  network at the Programme SAAGA offices in
  Ouagadougou. The network and internet connections
  went down several times during the day and once
  for a period of 24 hours. The problems were
  associated with wiring problems, router and
  firewall problems and not necessarily with the
  internet connection as such. The network and
  internet connections in Bobo Dialloso were found
  to be highly reliable and working fine. The
  problems in Ouagadougou could also be associated
  with frequent power outages at the Programme
  SAAGA office during my one-week stay.
• Unstable power supply and frequent power outages
  at the Programme SAAGA offices in Ouagadougou.
  Although a standby generator is available for
  power supply when normal electrical power outages
  occur it always took 30 seconds to a minute to
  change from normal to standby power. The UPS
  units that supply power to the radar and
  TITAN/CIDD computers during this transition are
  small and on days when several of these power
  outages occurred the UPS batteries were drained
  and were not able to continue to provide power to
  the computers and equipment. This resulted in
  systems losing power and rebooting after power
  was reinstated. This also resulted in loss of
  data.

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Africa Initiative ProposalActivities

• Finalize implementation of radars and software
  (Current funding)
  
• Provide expert in networking to evaluate and help
  design reliable network (New funding, travel and
  support, 1 month)
  
• Network Mali and Burkina Faso radars and
  potentially MIT Niger radar (new funding,
  software engineer, 1month)
  
• Stream data to UNIDATA (new funding, 1 month per
  year software engineer, UNIDATA)
  

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Proposal Activities (cont.)

• Burkina Faso has recently purchased two EEC
  C-band radars. As part of a sub-contract with
  EEC, NCAR is already working with Burkina Faso to
  provide upgraded software for one of the radars.
  
• Propose to upgrade the two C-band weather radars
  by providing a new receiver with Doppler
  capability including analysis software (1 month
  radar engineer, 1 month software engineer,
  hardware (50k).
• Education and training (3 people from Burkina
  Faso and Mali will visit NCAR for training,
  current funding GLOBE, COMET, UCAR EO, START,
  ASMET, etc?)
• Workshop in Fall or early winter in West Africa
  (Sahel other west African countries using
  existing networks).