Tyrone Dunbar, is a Met Office scientist currently seconded to Defra and DECC in support of our role in providing policy relevant science to Government. In this guest blog he talks about Climate Week.
This week is Climate Week, and there are thousands of climate week related events happening all over the UK. I’ve just had a quick look at the website and there are 2802 registered events shown on their interactive map, so there’s absolutely loads of stuff going on (I’ll be honest, I was surprised how many events have been organised!).
The week officially kicked off on Sunday with a launch event at Lancaster House in London. There was a wide range of inspiring projects on display, from innovative projects such as drought-resistant maize which helps farmers in Africa adapt to climate change, to campaigns such as the Sustainable Restaurant Association’s Too Good to Waste “doggy box” promotion. There was also the fantastic news that Defra and HR Wallingford won the award for Best Initiative by a Government or Statutory Body for their work on the Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA). The Met Office were also involved in the CCRA, providing scientific guidance on the latest climate projections (UKCP09) that underpin the study, leading on the risk assessment for the Energy Sector and provided further research on urban heat islands and rainfall runoff.
The Met Office is the official science advisor for Climate Week and we have a number of things going on as well. There was a Met Office stand at the launch event, and we have a poster display in the atrium at the Department for International Development (DfID) running throughout the week highlighting various climate change issues as well as Met Office research, such as forecasting of the onset of the rainy season in East Africa. This has been really well received and DfID will be sending this exhibition to posts around the world. We are also running a Climate Challenge competition in some local Tesco stores in Devon (Tesco are the main Climate Week sponsors), as you can see in the picture below.
You can find out more about the role of the Met Office as one of the worlds leading centres for climate science research in the climate change section of our website.
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Official blog of the Met Office news team 
Hi,
With all this talk about Africa, is there a reliable source online for rainfall data over recent seasons. Being a birding geek, I am particularly interested in the figures for regions south of the Sahara. My interest is with the migrant birds and their ability to fatten up on insects in the wet season, say from October to March.
Here’s hoping you have the best sources of information available.
Kind Regards
Tony Powell
Tony, I would suggest that you try TAMSAT, which is part of the Department of Meteorology at the University of Reading. They use satellite data to interpolate rainfall accumulations. This is not a trivial task as the network of ground based observations is so sparse. http://www.met.reading.ac.uk/tamsat/about/
HI Dave,
Many Thanks for that link. It is always a job to know where to get African continent data other than say Wunderground and then I would query the accuracy of the data. It does seem that a lot of Africa is lacking needed rainfall once again.
Kind Regards
Tony Powell