WCSSP South Africa Grant Funding FY2425

The Met Office intends to enter into one Grant Agreement per lot and the grant funding for this open call is confirmed to be ODA funded and therefore is pursuant of the International Development Act 2002. 

This open call is split into two (2) Lots. Bidders can submit a proposal for a single Lot or multiple Lots. If submitting for multiple Lots, each submission must be on a separate document - repetition of proposal content is permitted if answering the requirements. 

We invite bidders to propose grant activities to cover a 3-year (36 month) period, funding will initially be available for an 11-month period (May 2024 – March 2025). Subject to further funding allocations being received from DSIT, the Met Office will confirm extensions to the Grant Agreement on an annual basis to fund year 2 and year 3 activities.  

Lot Number & Title:  SA24_1.1 Improving representation of Climate Variability and change over Africa by using Machine Learning as a tool for Data Rescue. 

This lot falls under work package 1 focussed on monitoring and attribution, which aims to improve reconstructions of past climate variability and advance attribution studies as context for the present and future.  

In the past WCSSP South Africa has facilitated data rescue work contributing to the international Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions over the Earth (ACRE) initiative and the EU Copernicus Climate Change Services (C3S) Data Rescue Service. Ongoing work is supporting existing data rescue programmes at the Met Office, SAWS and University of Witwatersrand, aiming to recover and digitise data from aging archives in South Africa and across the region, and linking to relevant international initiatives (including ACRE). New research will explore machine learning techniques to enhance the efficiency of data rescue and analysis. In addition, WP1 will start to facilitate collaborations around extreme event attribution. This area of science is rapidly developing, with growing capabilities in the UK and South Africa, yet the potential for collaboration and shared learning has not yet been realised. Future work will explore the role of km-scale simulations in attribution studies and align with the newly initiated South African Extreme Climate Events Research Alliance (ECERA). The work package will also support capacity development of scientists in South Africa and the UK through coordinated training and support to broaden the pool of expertise. 

Lot Description: Improving representation of climate variability and change over Africa by using Machine Learning as a tool for Data Rescue 

The observational record of weather and climate is severely limited – there are many times and places where we have few or no observations, and these limitations restrict both science and predictions, particularly for extreme, high-impact events. This restriction is particularly severe over Africa.  

The aim of this project is to improve the observational record by taking archived observations – currently only on paper – and making them available to science by converting them into computer-readable form. Doing this by hand is unacceptably slow and expensive, but recent developments in Machine Learning offer the potential of a fast, automatic data rescue process.  

This project should combine state-of-the-art Machine Learning methods, and pre-existing work on data rescue, to produce a recommended method for automatic observation transcription. The work should apply that method to some undigitized records from South Africa, Africa or the surrounding oceans, to demonstrate its effectiveness and scalability. The work should also elaborate how the method can be shared and used more widely.  

Where appropriate, research should be done in collaboration with WCSSP South Africa partners and help explore opportunities to build capacity in use of the method. 

Lot Number & Title:  SA24_4.2 Advancing Rip Current forecasts for beach locations across South Africa 

This lot falls under work package 4, which is focussed on Science for Services, with the aim to translate underpinning science and understanding of decisions through co-development of weather and climate services, and transdisciplinary processes, to strengthen South African and UK resilience to weather and climate impacts.  To meet the overall aim of the project, WP4 has been critical in building understanding of needs and gaps in the provision of weather and climate services in South Africa, informing underpinning science priorities. WP4 has also explored the ethical dimensions of weather and climate services, recognising the issues arising from science-driven service development.  

Given the longstanding partnership between SAWS and the Met Office since the inception of the project, and the role of SAWS as the mandated national meteorological service in South Africa, the project has primarily focused on the development of services delivered by SAWS – e.g., marine and energy services. With the expanded partnership, the project is now building on these activities and co-develop services across partners, as well as supporting the broader enabling environment for decision-led weather and climate services.  

Lot Description:  Advancing Rip Current forecasts for beach locations across South Africa 

Rip currents are one of the biggest dangers facing beach users in South Africa. To safeguard members of the public and prepare emergency services, a collaborative project by the University of Plymouth and SAWS developed forecasting tools for rip current hazards in South Africa. The one-year project, funded by WCSSP South Africa in FY20-21, engaged the National Sea Rescue Institute, City of Cape Town, Stellenbosch University, and Lifesaving South Africa, bringing together sea rescue incident records, wind, wave, and water level forecasts as well as the results of field experiments. Despite challenges from the pandemic, a pilot operational rip risk hazard forecast for the Cape Peninsula coastline was developed and successfully trialled in June 2021 to warn the public of the risk of rip currents.   

Building on the success of the initial trial service, expansion to an operational service with greater coverage of South African beaches is deemed both desirable and important. There is particularly a need to extend forecasts beyond Cape Town for other dangerous locations across South Africa. This project would build on the previous project, helping to strengthen capacity at SAWS and advance the application of rip current forecasts. Over the course of the three-year project (pending funding extensions for years 2 and 3), the aim is to establish a long-term sustainable service that contributes a measurable (and evidenced) improvement in rip current incident prevention at multiple locations, to enhance beach safety.  

The work aligns with the WCSSP South Africa Science Plan, which identifies the marine sector as one of four priority sectors. It also responds to the desire of SAWS (a core partner in WCSSP South Africa) to expand and update the current code and further explore coastal hazard services at SAWS.