Abstract

The CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) and the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, Earth Institute, Columbia University (IRI) organized three parallel capacity building workshops in the context of Accelerating the Impact of CGIAR Climate Research for Africa project (AICCRA) project. The objective of the training was advancing the availability, access, and use of high-quality climate information to anticipate, manage, and respond to climate-related disasters and longer-term climate change. The three workshops were as follows: 1) The Climate Data Tool (CDT) and Automatic Weather Station Data Tool (ADT); 2) The IRI Data Library and Maproom; and 3) Seasonal Forecasting Approaches. Zambia meteorological department officers through the support of Accelerating the Impact of CGIAR Climate Research for Africa project (AICCRA) project attended the training. The aim of this workshop was to provide advanced training on the Climate Data Tool (CDT) to national meteorological service staff. CDT is an open-source, R-based software with an easy-to-use a graphical user interface used for data organization, quality control, combining station data with satellite and reanalysis data, evaluating merged and inputs datasets, performing an array of analyses, and visualization.