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UNESCO International Hydrological Programme (UNESCO IHP)

SDG13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts

Through its initiatives related to address Climate Change and its impacts SDG-13, UNESCOIHP supports countries in identifying and addressing their information gaps and needs when it becomes essential to managing the risks resulting from the changing hydrological and climatic impacts. This is achieved by strengthening global, regional and local capacities and by providing access to data for policy recommendations and for more integrated hydro-climate risk management. To that effect, UNESCO-IHP supported the development of an integrated flood and drought monitoring and forecasting system for Asia, Africa and Latin America. The system tracks hydrological conditions, including extremes (e.g. floods and droughts), in near real-time and allows medium-term and seasonal forecasting. It therefore provides monitoring capabilities for meteorological, hydrological and agricultural drought and flood conditions, which is particularly useful in developing regions where institutional capacity for monitoring and early warning is generally lacking, and access to information and technology prevents the development of such systems locally. The system has been successfully deployed in Western, Eastern and Southern Africa combined with training of experts and is being used as a complementary information system by regional institutions to monitor agro-hydrometeorological conditions, particularly during the rainy seasons.

Similarly, UNESCO-IHP has collaborated with the Centre for Hydrometeorology and Remote Sensing (CHRS) at the University of California, Irvine, on the development of tools to provide near real-time global satellite precipitation estimates at high spatial and temporal resolutions, including the Precipitation Estimation from Remotely Sensed Information using Artificial Neural Networks-Cloud Classification System (PERSIANN-CCS). This specific system provides essential information for emergency planning and management of hydrological risks, such as floods, droughts, and other extreme weather events. For example, the Namibia Hydrological Services (NHS) uses this system to prepare daily bulletins with up-to-date information on flood and drought conditions for local communities. The system is now available through the iRain mobile application, specially designed to facilitate people’s involvement in collecting local data for global precipitation monitoring (http://en.unesco.org/news/irain-new-mobile-app-promotecitizen-science-and-support-water-management). iRain allows users to visualize real-time global satellite precipitation observations, track extreme precipitation events worldwide, and report local rainfall information using a crowd-sourcing functionality to supplement these data. It also provides on-the-ground information which can improve remote sensing precipitation estimations.

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