Operations Plan

1. Summary details: WISER-EWSA Testbed 1

Dates: Monday 29th January to Friday 9th February 2024.

Venues:

Testbed Operational Centre: Zambia Meteorological Department (ZMD), Lusaka

South Africa Testbed Office: South African Weather Service (SAWS), Pretoria.

Mozambique Testbed Office, Instituto Nacional de Meteorologia (INAM), Maputo.

https://www.wiser-ewsa.org/testbed/

https://www.wiser-ewsa.org/

Contact details: WISER-EWSA Project Office: wiser-ewsa@ncas.ac.uk

This document provides an outline of the plans for the testbed in order to orient participants and partners to the overall aims and practicalities. All details will be refined in the intervening months through a series of planning meetings, workshops and co-production events between practitioners and users. A much more comprehensive Operations Plan will be released prior to the event.

2. Background; Outputs and Outcomes

WISER-EWSA Testbed 1 (T-1) will be a live severe weather forecasting event conducted in Southern Africa over a period of 2 weeks early in 2024. During the testbed, meteorologists, academics, economists, and user-engagement specialists will create real-time warnings of severe weather, deliver these to partnering user groups, and co-evaluate the effectiveness of those warnings. Learning from T-1 will be used to design and deliver a second testbed early in 2025.

The Testbed is being conducted as part of the WISER Early Warnings for Southern Africa (WISER-EWSA: 2023-2025) project. The WISER-EWSA team of meteorologists, academics, economists, and user-engagement specialists from South Africa, Zambia, Mozambique and the UK will work with disaster risk management agencies and non-governmental organisations, focusing on women and people with disabilities to reduce disaster risk through the co-production of new weather and climate information services and early warnings.

Testbed 1 will build on experience in the first African testbeds, conducted in the GCRF African SWIFT project (2017-2022) and documented by Fletcher et al. (2023).

WISER-EWSA Testbed 1 contributes to the Theory of Change of the WISER-EWSA project, and the wider WISER programme. As such, the intended Outputs and Outcomes of Testbed 1 are as follows.

Outputs

The testbed will deliver the following:

a. Early Warning Systems (EWS) which have been co-produced between forecast providers (in a network of agencies and countries) and users, and tested and evaluated in the testbed.

b. Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) of the EWS, which have been tested and evaluated.

c. Documentation of other good practice as part of Knowledge Management and Applied Learning.

d. Training and practical experience of forecasters and users in use of nowcasting as a part of EWS.

e. End-to-end evaluation of the value-chain associated with urban EWS.

The testbed contributes directly to WISER-EWSA Outputs:

Urban populations who know how to access, understand and use EWSs
Improved capacity to generate EWSs and co-produce alerts in 3 countries

The testbed will also be used to provide evidence to support the other WISER-EWSA outputs:

Business models for co-produced EWS sustainability

Regional awareness of nowcast potential for Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR)

In turn this contributes to four WISER-Africa Outputs

Output 1: Strengthened co-production between producers, intermediaries and users to improve the uptake and use of weather and climate information services across weather to climate timescales.

Output 2: Strengthened networks, partnerships and regional and national coordination mechanisms that support the generation, uptake and use of enhanced weather and climate information services.

Output 3: Strengthened designated producers’ capacity to deliver enhanced user-led weather and climate information services.

Output 5: Better evidence and learning, continually strengthening co-produced weather and climate information services and programme decision-making.

Figure A: Schematic diagram of testbed sites. The TOC will be hosted at ZMD, Lusaka. Numbers against the organisations are a guide to the likely number of staff from each organisation present in each centre. “Intl” indicates additional international contributors, from the UK, WMO and elsewhere. The green boxes indicate engagement with users in each centre.

3. Locations

The testbed will create and share forecasts of severe and high-impact weather in the Southern African region. This will be conducted as a co-production and evaluation exercise in partnership with a selected group of forecast users. The activity will not replace or duplicate any mandated weather services and early warning systems.

The creation and delivery of forecasts will be conducted in three centres. Most of the scientific participants will come together at the Testbed Operational Centre (TOC) at ZMD in Lusaka. Smaller teams will remain in SAWS (Pretoria) and INAM (Maputo) to focus on engagement with their local user groups in the forecast delivery.

Figure B: Simplified multi-sited testbed schematic and information flow. The TOC will be located at the ZMD, where most of the testbed activities will happen. From the TOC, forecasts will be relayed to the Kanyama hub, and to the community. Additionally, the intermediary organisations and end-user representatives at the Kanyama hub can also relay the forecasts to the communities through their networks. Feedback from the community can be directly sent to the TOC or via the Kanyama hub. Similar activities to those happening in Zambia will be replicated in Mozambique and South Africa, albeit at a smaller scale.

4. Personnel, operational teams

There will be about 20 people working in the main Testbed Operational Centre, plus collaborating organisations and users. Groups of around 2-4 people will be working in the other centres.

Personnel will consist of

Meteorologists (forecasters, academics etc);
Impact specialists (DRR / DRM professionals);
Social scientists;
Representatives of user groups.

The link to the different roles on a daily basis has been drafted.

The participants will be organised into teams responsible for different aspects of the forecast creation, communication, decision-making, feedback and evaluation.

We are open to the opportunity to partner with relevant organisations, programmes and projects. Please get in touch if you would like to discuss your potential involvement.

All Testbed participants should be added to this spreadsheet

4.1 Short-range severe weather forecast team (meteorologists and impact specialists)

Responsible for 12-48h forecast using an ensemble of NWP model forecasts.
Creates a map of severe weather likelihood and some written forecasts and alerts. Creates risk maps and colour-coded alerts.
Provides a synoptic summary of drivers relevant to the nowcasting.
Follows the methodology of SWFP.
Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) has been created based on existing local practice

4.2 Nowcasting team (meteorologists and impact specialists)

Responsible for nowcasting of high-impact weather according to user needs, using all available observations and projections.
Creates and updates maps and timelines. Delivers alerts through various communication channels.
We will design the nowcasting methodology in co-production with users, making use of the existing protocols and Standard Operating Procedures of SAWS, INAM and ZMD, and learning from the SWIFT testbeds.
Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) has been created based on existing local practice

4.3 Evaluation and Engagement team (meteorologists, impact specialists, social scientists, users)

Performs validation of prior forecast and nowcast accuracy.
Manages the user feedback regarding information supplied.
Makes evaluation of EWS effectiveness day by day.
The methodology for the Evaluation and Engagement team will be developed in co-production with all participants.
The Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) is in final editing and will be made available shortly.

4.4 Management and decision-making

We will define a management structure for day-to-day running of the testbed, including chairing of meetings, record-taking, decision-making, logistical management, Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) and knowledge management. In particular:

The TOC Floor Leader and deputy are to be designated for each day of the testbed.

Chair discussions and meetings.
Ensure timekeeping and reporting.

Scientific Secretary will be designated for each day:

Maintain notes from meetings and discussions.
Ensure timekeeping and reporting.
Coordinate documents; keep shared file spaces tidy.
Help with publicity, for example, sharing highlights of the day over social media.
Make daily summaries, following the Testbed 1 daily summaries sheet.

The specific roles and responsibilities of the scientific secretary are in the Scientific secretary task form.

5. Schedules

5.1 Weekly including periodic reviews

12 days, including weekends.

Two testbed dinners are planned, one mid-testbed and the other at the end of the testbed.

Review meetings: Short reviews (30 mins) will be held daily. Longer formal review meetings will be

Saturday 3rd Feb
Thursday 8th Feb: team meetings at community hub
Friday 9th Feb: final wrap-up reviews and discussion..

An engagement day on the Wednesday of the second week 7th Feb) is also planned.

The full schedule gives details of the two weeks testbed.

5.2 Daily

A daily schedule of activities gives the details of how the day will unfold.

5.3 Informal engagement and relationship-building

An engagement day is planned on Wednesday, 7th February 2024. It is hoped that visitors from the government, private sector and the community will participate. To enable regional and international participation, two webinars are planned.

6. Forecast and nowcast products for specialists (NMS / DMM)

6.1 Model products

Details of these products are in the Synoptic SOP.

7. Communications channels and products for users

An important aim of the project is to exploit a broad range of media for the communication of early warnings, and to evaluate how these are used. These include the following.

Written guidance documents and summaries.
WhatsApp
SMS
Web products
Apps: SAWS WeatherSmart app (South Africa) and FASTA app (Zambia and Mozambique).

8. Feedback protocols

We are finalising Terms of Reference for community observers to provide feedback. This will comprise:

Daily meetings in the community hub
Electronic feedback.

More details can be found in the ToR document.

9. Economic analysis

Analysis of the conduct of the testbed will contribute to the economic analysis of the delivery and use of EWS. This will be handled in the testbed

10. Logistics

Logistics coordinator: Mrs Denise Groves (NCAS, Leeds)

Data transfer
We are intending to use two methods of data transfer to ensure reliability – 5G and Starlink. The procurement procedure for a starlink system for ZMD is underway, but we have an NCAS system we can borrow for the testbed on standby in case the ZMD system is not in place in time.

Data access platforms
https://www.wiser-ewsa.org/testbed/portal/
Shared spaces for reports, alerts etc. – Shared Google Drive
This has been shared with everyone on the current WISER-EWSA drive, any additional people requiring access should send their google ID to Denise Groves
Office and meeting space
Office space for the main TOC in Lusaka is hosted at ZMD ( H8MC+H2H, Haile Selassie Ave, Lusaka 30200, Lusaka, Zambia).

The Zambia Community Hub is located in Kanyama (St. Daniel Comboni Social Development Centre, just off of Los Angeles Boulevard Makeni Villa Kanyama, Lusaka).

Accommodation and transportation
This is being arranged by SAWS. Anyone intending to attend the testbed in person needs to ensure their arrival and departure dates and times are on the participants spreadsheet

11. Visitors to the testbed

Visitors are in principle welcome to come and observe the testbed in action according to the Visitor Protocol. Contact project participants to arrange visits.

12. Knowledge Management and Applied Learning (KMAL)

Our KMAL planning will be used to design the following.

Structured outputs bringing in learning from all participants, for instance ensuring that insight from across all partners is used to evaluate and refine our SOPs.
Collection of unstructured learning and insights, for instance through discussion groups and through quick notes collated in a shared document.

13. Planning

Testbed 1 is planned in WP4 of WISER-EWSA.

Leaders: Doug Parker, NCAS, University of Leeds; Katharine Vincent, Kulima.

Testbed planning team:

Hellen Msemo (Testbed Lead)
Denise Groves (Testbed coordinator)
Nico Kroese (SAWS lead)
Felix Imbwae (ZMD lead)
Goncalves Junior (INAM lead)
Simon Ageet (Project Scientist, NCAS, Leeds).

14. Value for Money

The Testbed planning process will work to deliver high value for money, in particular paying attention to the main cost-drivers and optimal budgeting for these. Value for money will include consideration of workloads associated with preparing, delivering and evaluating the event.

The cost drivers have been identified, as those items with significant costs where decision-making can optimise the expenditure. For these items, we have obtained multiple quotes and made transparent, recorded decisions over the choices.

Model	Detail	Platform	Products	Notes
NWCSAF	Various NWC-SAF output will be utilised from SAWS ; Leeds ; Eumetsat	WISER RSMC ; WISER_EWSA Data Catalogue ; Eumetview ; Adaguc	1. Rapidly Developing Thunderstorm (RDT) 2. Convective Rainfall Rate (CRR) 3. Instability Indices (PW, TT, KI, LI) 4. Convection Initiation (CI) 5. Precipitating Clouds 6. Cloud products (Cloud Phase, Cloud Type)
SAWS radars	Operational SAWS radars covering high risk areas of South Africa.	WISER RSMC	Reflectivity maps
Flood risk products	South African Regional Flash Flood Guidance System (SARFFG)	SARFFG portal linked to WISER RSMC	Flash Flood Guidance Maps
Satellite channels; RGBs	12 single channels ; colour enhancements ; difference channels available ; RGB’s available	Puma/Synergie ; Eumetview ; Adaguc	1. 12 single MSG channels 2. Colour enhancements (if available) 3. Satellite difference channels (if available) 4. RGB combinations (if available)
NFLICS	See portal.
DWD Nowcasting product	DWD nowcasting product using AI on lightning data.	WISER_EWSA Data Catalogue
Severe Storm Indicator	New potential product based on NWC-SAF to be tested to identify severe weather producing storms	WISER RSMC	Maps

WISER-EWSA Testbed 1 Operations Plan