Applications

TAMSAT data are used in a range of climate services and applications. Examples of some of these are provided below.

Building capacity of African national and regional meteorological services to utilise satellite data Since its inception in the 1970s, TAMSAT’s primary aim has been to build capacity in Africa to utilise satellite data. In the past, we worked directly with NHMSs to develop and implement local version of TAMSAT.

Supporting farmers through weather-based index insurance For over a decade, TAMSAT data has been used by the insurance sector in Africa to provide index (parametric) insurance to farmers. To date, TAMSAT data has helped to provide insurance to millions of farmers across Africa.

Forecasting of agricultural drought Soil moisture forecasts issued through TAMSAT’S TAMSAT-ALERT platform provides probabilistic outlooks on soil moisture across Africa and hence the likelihood of agricultural drought. TAMSAT-ALERT forecasts are already being used across in West and East Africa to aid decision support.

Enhancing National Climate Services throughout Africa The Enhancing National Climate Services (ENACTS) initiative supports national hydro-meteorological services in Africa with the provision of robust meteorological monitoring. ENACTS is led by the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, but works in close partnership with TAMSAT.

Improving satellite-based rainfall estimates The TAMSAT group are continually striving to improve the accuracy of TAMSAT satellite rainfall estimates to provide additional information to existing users and to allow the data to be useful in a wider range of applications. In recent years, we have developed methods to merge rain gauge observations with satellite rainfall estimates and to generate estimates of uncertainty. We will be releasing these improvements in the near future.