Justicia Shipena
Come October, researchers across Southern Africa will gain access to a new digital platform that centralises climate data.
The SASSCAL Climate Service Gateway, developed by Southern African and German researchers, will be unveiled at the SASSCAL 2.0 Research Programme conference in Luanda, Angola.
The portal will house climate data sets and model projections tailored for the Southern African region.
It will include variables such as minimum and maximum temperatures, humidity, wind speed, as well as derived indicators like heat wave days, high fire danger days, drought indices, and precipitation events.
Researchers will be able to download complete or regional data sets and use built-in visualisation tools for analysis.
The Gateway is one of the key outcomes of the Tipping Points Explained by Climate Change (TIPPECC) project, which is part of the SASSCAL 2.0 Research Portfolio.
Recently, researchers from Germany and Southern Africa met in Windhoek to consolidate and present their findings under the TIPPECC project and to review progress on the Gateway.
Professor François Engelbrecht, the project’s lead investigator, said the platform will improve data access for scientists working on climate change in the region.
“So they don’t have to download the entire data for Southern Africa. Users can select the area for which the data is needed,” he said.
He added that overall, this Gateway will improve data accessibility and enable more work on climate change impacts and adaptation in the region.
Dr. Torsten Weber, principal investigator from the GERICS Climate Service Centre in Germany, said the Gateway was designed with stakeholder needs in mind.
“We are supporting Southern Africa in developing a regional or more sophisticated portal that is needed in the region,” he said.
He noted that GERICS and SASSCAL have collaborated since the first SASSCAL Research Portfolio, which ran from 2018 to 2021.
Their partnership continued through the second phase, which resulted in the development of the Gateway.
Currently, the platform is hosted in Germany and is undergoing its final testing phase before being transferred to SASSCAL servers.
The data sets available through the Gateway come from TIPPECC researchers and other international contributors. Some of the data was also used to support the IPCC’s previous climate report.
The project is supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
