June 2023 Monthly Collaboration Meeting Report

Participating organizations included the University of California (UCSB) Climate Hazards Center (CHC), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the United States Geological Survey (USGS), and the University of Maryland (UMD). The meeting focused on collaboration points discussed and recorded by all teams. The Hub team noted the Science team's work on creating a seasonal monitoring and probability generator (SMPG) tool to generate reports on the progression of rains in Ethiopia every 10 days during the rainy season. The Hub plans to investigate incorporating the tool into the FEWS NET Data Warehouse (FDW) to assist the Science team in generating these reports and expanding to other countries. The Hub also noted ongoing collaborative work to load new data into the crop domain of the FDW, including identifying inconsistencies and errors within the current dataset. A future area of collaboration between the Hub and Science team will center on exploring the feasibility of loading agroclimatology assumption reports into a relational database in the FDW. This will allow the Science team to query, analyze trends, and perform historic analyses within the FDW. The Hub also noted initial conversations with the USGS GeoEngine team regarding potential collaborative work to identify Science team products that could be added to the data published via their API. The Science team noted collaborative work with the Early Warning team to integrate agricultural production estimates into the Food Security Outlook development process. The CHC team is working with NASA and Hub colleagues on FDW crop production data processing and quality control. Science team members with the CHC and NOAA are collaborating on the application of calibrated subseasonal climate forecasts for climate impact forecasting. The Science and Hub teams are working to develop a crop assessment dashboard in the FDW, which the CHC has contributed design inputs for. The Science team is also exploring the use of decomposed reference evapotranspiration data to investigate aspects of temperature that could inform early warning. CHC and Hub team colleagues are discussing the possibility of archiving agroclimatology assumptions used in the Food Security Outlook development process. The Science team provided briefings to the Early Warning team on work ready for uptake, and a plan will be developed to communicate this information and distribute training materials to the wider Early Warning team. The Science team's ongoing work to track and monitor a forecasted El Niño later this year will support the Early Warning team's upcoming analyses.