Programme
The different sessions will promote multidisciplinary approaches to address the geophysical and societal dimensions of AMMA’s major scientific objectives. Mornings will be dedicated to plenary sessions accessible to a wide audience and will include solicited and contributed oral presentations. In the afternoons, parallel sessions will be dedicated to more focused issues and to discussions. Oral presentations will be given either in English or in French. Simultaneous translation will be available during plenary sessions only.
Special emphasis will be given to poster sessions which will be used to motivate discussion in the conference. The poster exhibition will be installed all week long to host more focused sessions.
The conference themes are:
(I) Society, Environment and Climate Interactions
Presentations are encouraged that are concerned with the broad theme of the interactions between society, environment and climate in West Africa including:
- Natural and water resources, agriculture and livestock: climate and socio-economic constraints and opportunities
- Health, environment and social vulnerability
- Vulnerability and adaptative strategies of West African societies facing African monsoon variability and climate change
- Policies for climate change and adaptation, mitigation and management of renewable resources in West African countries
(II) Predictability and Prediction of the West African Monsoon and its Impacts
Four time scales are highlighted: weather (less than 10 days), intraseasonal (10-90 days), interannual-to-multidecadal, and climate change. Presentations in this theme are expected to be somewhat applied and should be concerned with:
- Evaluation and improvement of processes and feedbacks in regional and global models
- Skill and bias evaluation in forecasting tools
- Predictability studies
- Operational prediction activities
- Assimilation of newly available observations
- Impact-oriented prediction tool
(III) The West African Monsoon System
Presentations in this theme are encouraged that improve our understanding of the nature and variability of the WAM system at the same timescales emphasized in theme II above. Emphasis should be given to :
- Feedback loops: convection - environment, atmosphere - aerosols, land surface - atmosphere, ocean – atmosphere
- Water and energy cycles and links with continental and ocean surface and sub-surface
- WAM variability and teleconnections