DACCIWA

Over five years from 2013 to 2018, the DACCIWA project (Dynamics-Aerosol-Chemistry-Cloud Interactions in West Africa, funded by the EU) worked with partners in the region to improve understanding of the meteorology and air quality of West Africa (see Knippertz et al., 2015). 

The region is heavily dependent on precipitation from the West African monsoon. However, a lack of observations and an incomplete understanding of the way aerosols, clouds, radiation and regional circulations interact, is hampering accurate predictions of the monsoon and its subsequent impacts.

A key element of the DACCIWA project was a major field campaign in densely populated southern West Africa in summer 2016, involving three research aircrafts and a wide range of surface-based instrumentation at three sites in Ghana, Benin and Nigeria.

DACCIWA produced the most comprehensive observational dataset of the atmosphere over the region to date (see Flamant et al., 2018)and used this dataset to foster our understanding of atmospheric processes, and to evaluate dynamical models and satellite data.