Dr. Shrad Shukla, Dr. Greg Husak, and Dr. Chris Funk of the Climate Hazards Group have been recently awarded $600,000 by NASA-SERVIR for a three year project titled “Enhancing Eastern and Southern Africa climate services by increasing access to remote sensing and model datasets”.
The primary goal of this project is to support informed agroclimate decision-making (e.g. Food Security related decisions) by local and national stakeholders in East Africa and Southern Africa by enhancing the climate services of the SERVIR-Eastern and Southern Africa hub (Regional Center for Mapping and Resource Development (RCMRD, http://www.rcmrd.org/), located in Nairobi, Kenya.
Geography Graduate Student Sari Blakeley contributed to the proposal by providing context of index insurance (a type of insurance that pays out based on levels of weather proxies, such as remotely sensed precipitation) in climate science; specifically linking improvement in forecasting with uptake of index insurance, designing future indices to take in to account climate variability and climate change, and capitalizing on spatial variability in the design of indices.
Click here for link to the UC Santa Barbara Current story.
Congratulations to Shrad, Greg, Chris, Sari, and colleagues on this award!
