Dr. Miliaritiana Robjhon and Nick Novella attended the tenth International Workshop on Climate Variability and Prediction (ITWCVP), in Guayaquil, Ecuador from July 9-20 2018. This workshop was organized and co-sponsored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and World Meteorological Organization (WMO) to provide useful resources to climate scientists from National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHS). The goal of the workshop was to build capacity for NMHS developing nations by helping to enhance operational sub-seasonal to seasonal forecasting and official outlook products.
During the first week of the workshop from July 9-13, 2018, Nick and Dr. Robjhon were invited to act as instructors, where they conducted lectures and training modules on QGIS, an open-sourced and freely distributed GIS software, for more than a dozen meteorologists. The week-long training consisted of hands-on demonstration of QGIS capabilities with weather and climate data, including the management of vector and raster data on global, regional and local scales, and the implementation of geo-processing algorithms, interpolation, and model building tools to render production-level forecast products.
Discussion was provided on how QGIS could be applied towards their respective operational and research activities. The skills developed during this session were also used during the following week of the workshop where participants listened to presentations focusing on the basic state of the climate, climate variability and prediction over Caribbean, Central and South American region. Participants were able to make experimental forecasts by using QGIS to map the forecasts and to create raster and shape files.