There is a great demand to improve predictions of high-impact weather across the African continent. This is because of the high frequency of intense convective storms that often produce severe flooding, strong winds and lightning, combined with the vulnerability of people, infrastructure and businesses to such hazards. The skill of numerical weather prediction over Africa is still low, even for lead times of less than 24 hours. Therefore, there is a particular need to deliver nowcasting of events as they occur. However, there remains a widespread lack of provision of nowcasting across Africa and virtually no use of automated nowcasting systems or tools. This limits the ability of national meteorological services to issue warnings and therefore potentially prevent the loss of life and significant financial losses. Coverage by meteorological radars is still very limited, but geostationary satellites provide regular high resolution data of the often large and long-lived storms. As such, there is an opportunity to improve satellite-based nowcasting capability in Africa. Work being undertaken as part of the Global Challenges Research Fund African SWIFT (Science for Weather Information and Forecasting Techniques) project is starting to improve the nowcasting of African convective systems and so the ability to provide timely warnings of extreme weather providing a wide range of benefits.

中文翻译：

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非洲临近预报：进展、潜力和价值

改进整个非洲大陆高影响天气的预测的需求很大。这是因为强烈的对流风暴频繁发生，通常会产生严重的洪水、强风和闪电，再加上人员、基础设施和企业对此类灾害的脆弱性。对非洲进行数值天气预报的技能仍然很低，即使提前期少于 24 小时。因此，特别需要在事件发生时对其进行临近预报。然而，整个非洲仍然普遍缺乏临近预报，而且几乎没有使用自动临近预报系统或工具。这限制了国家气象部门发布警报的能力，因此有可能防止生命损失和重大经济损失。气象雷达的覆盖范围仍然非常有限，但地球静止卫星提供了通常大且寿命长的风暴的定期高分辨率数据。因此，有机会提高非洲基于卫星的临近预报能力。作为全球挑战研究基金非洲 SWIFT（天气信息和预报技术科学）项目的一部分，正在开展的工作开始改进非洲对流系统的临近预报，从而提高及时提供极端天气警报的能力，从而带来广泛的好处.