Preparedness saves lives. Forecasts can help improve preparedness by triggering early actions as part of pre-defined protocols under the Forecast-based Financing (FbF) approach; however it is essential to understand the skill of a forecast before using it as a trigger. In order to support the development of early-action protocols over Kenya, we evaluate the 33 heavy rainfall advisories (HRAs) issued by the Kenya Meteorological Department (KMD) during 2015–2019.The majority of HRAs warn counties which subsequently receive heavy rainfall within the forecast window. We also find a significant improvement in the advisory ability to anticipate flood events over time, with particularly high levels of skill in recent years. For instance actions with a 2-week lifetime based on advisories issued in 2015 and 2016 would have failed to anticipate nearly all recorded flood events in that period, whilst actions in 2019 would have anticipated over 70 % of the instances of flooding at the county level. When compared against the most significant flood events over the period which led to significant loss of life, all three such periods during 2018 and 2019 were preceded by HRAs, and in these cases the advisories accurately warned the specific counties for which significant impacts were recorded. By contrast none of the four significant flooding events in 2015–2017 were preceded by advisories. This step change in skill may be due to developing forecaster experience with synoptic patterns associated with extremes as well as access to new dynamical prediction tools that specifically address extreme event probability; for example, KMD access to the UK Met Office Global Hazard Map was introduced at the end of 2017.Overall we find that KMD HRAs effectively warn of heavy rainfall and flooding and can be a vital source of information for early preparedness. However a lack of spatial detail on flood impacts and broad probability ranges limit their utility for systematic FbF approaches. We conclude with suggestions for making the HRAs more useful for FbF and outline the developing approach to flood forecasting in Kenya.

中文翻译：

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肯尼亚气象部门的强降雨建议对基于预报的早期行动和洪水的早期准备有用吗？

做好准备可以挽救生命。预测可以通过触发早期行动作为基于预测的融资（FbF）方法下预定义协议的一部分来帮助提高准备水平；但是，在将其用作触发器之前，必须先了解预测的技巧。为了支持肯尼亚早期行动协议的制定，我们评估了肯尼亚气象部（KMD）在2015–2019年发布的33场强降雨咨询（HRA）。大多数HRA都警告县，随后这些县在预测窗口。我们还发现，随着时间的推移，预测洪水事件的咨询能力有了显着提高，而近年来的技能尤其高。 ％县一级的洪水实例。与导致生命重大损失的这段时期内最严重的洪灾事件相比，2018年和2019年这三个时期都发生了HRA，在这些情况下，咨询会准确地警告记录有重大影响的特定县。相比之下，2015年至2017年的四次重大洪灾事件都没有预警。技能上的这一步变化可能是由于开发了具有与极端事件相关的天气模式的预报员经验，并且可以使用专门解决极端事件概率的新动态预测工具。例如，2017年末KMD访问了英国气象局全球危害地图。总体而言，我们发现KMD HRA有效地警告了暴雨和洪水，并且可以作为早期准备的重要信息来源。但是，由于缺乏有关洪水影响的空间细节和较大的概率范围，限制了它们在系统性FbF方法中的实用性。最后，我们提出了一些建议，以使HRA对FbF更加有用，并概述了肯尼亚洪水预报的发展方法。