FANFAR operational production system presented at the 2nd workshop for Western Africa in Accra, Ghana

The FANFAR consortium (SMHI, Terradue, AGRHYMET/CILSS, NIHSA, IsardSAT and Eawag) organised with the Ministry of Works and Housing, Republic of Ghana, the 2nd FANFAR workshop/atelier, aiming at demonstrations and training on the new version of the Flood Forecast Pilot System, designed to meet identified needs in West Africa.

During the workshop held in Accra, Ghana, from 07 to 13 April 2019, more than 40 participants from more than 15 Meteo / Hydro / DRR agencies worked on the co-design and in the strengthening of the FANFAR project specifications, that shall provide access to operational forecasts and alerts in addressing the flood challenges in West Africa.

FANFAR is an European Union funded project that supports the co-design, user-driven adaptation, and joint operation a short- and medium-term hydrological forecasting and alert pilot system for West Africa. It aims at providing key stakeholders with reliable and timely access to operational forecasts and alerts enabled by a robust forecast production system adapted to regional conditions and operated by West African institutions.

This 2nd workshop is an important milestone for the operational forecasting system. As part of the workshop demonstrations, Terradue presented the major achievements performed to complete the implementation and the operational deployment of the initial processing chain, which will be the processing core of the FANFAR solution:

  1. Collection and harvesting of the meteo/hydrological observations and measurements all over the Niger and Volta basins.

  2. Operation of two systematic data processing services, both integrated & configured by FANFAR partners using Terradue’s Ellip solutions, and deployed on production servers from Terradue Cloud Platform:

  3. Automatic results analysis with a post processing workflow distributing accordingly the results, using various channels such as Alert Portal, Email and SMS.

Participating hydrologists have been engaged to use the FANFAR services powered by Ellip, with Emmanuel Mathot (Terradue) delivering the training session through the Hydrology TEP Portal, which has been developed in partnership with the European Space Agency in 2017-2018.