STatistical Early WArning systems of weather-related Risks from probabilistic forecasts, over cities in West Africa – STEWARd

With the increase in the severity and occurrence of natural disasters in recent years over West Africa, a better prediction of their impacts is of key challenge. This project aims to develop a forecast model on weather-related risk on population over high vulnerable cities: Abidjan, Dakar, Ouagadougou and Niamey. It will focus on intense hydro-meteorological events, responsible of the largest number of fatalities over West Africa, heat waves and dust storms, risk factors for bacterial meningitis. To achieve that goal, optimizing and extracting robust information from big datasets derived from reanalysis and probabilistic forecast models are necessary. The objectives are to identify the high impacting hazard events thanks to field investigations on impacts and to extract robust and meaningful early warning indices of weather-related risks from numerical models. This project is innovative in assessing the predictability of the risks thanks to tailoring and multi-disciplinary approaches.