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The Author

AdrianAdrian Tompkins is the author of VECTRI. He has a background in climate modelling in particular in the physics of tropical clouds and convection. At ECMWF he was a staff scientist responsible for the development of the cloud physics in the operational forecasting system. While there he became interested in how forecasts, both short range and monthly to seasonal, could be better used on the ground in Africa. Once at ICTP, his interest grew in malaria modelling as a result of being involved in the design of two EUFP projects, one of which he co-authored, on climate and health. In 2010, it was apparent that there was a need for a regional malaria model that could be applied to forecasting tasks, but that accounted for population dynamics, in particular to account for different tranmission rates in urban and rural environments. Applying the techniques acquired in the numerical and technical development of cloud and convection parameterization schemes, the code develoment started in 2011. In November of that year VECTRI was launched in Addis Ababa and is still undergoing active development with an expanding team of collaborators.


ICTP Team

felipeFelipe Colon Gonzalez obtained his PhD at UEA working on statistical models for dengue tranmission - he is presently working on large and complicated datasets for malaria transmission in Rwanda and Uganda, for which he aims to apply statistical modelling techniques to identify in particular the role of socio economic factors in transmission. He is using the data to validate VECTRI runs and aims eventually to develop a hybrid statistical-dynamical system built around VECTRI that incorporates socio economic factors that are difficult to model explicitly.

Ernest Ernest Asare (KNUST, Ghana) - is from Ghana and is conducting his PhD at KNUST and at ICTP under the STEP sandwich programme, co-supervised by Adria Tompkins. The key aim of his research is to improve the surface hydrology aspect of VECTRI.


Collaborators

VolkerVolker Ermert (Cologne, Germany) is an expert on the Liverpool Malaria Model (LMM) which he used for his PhD work. Volker visited ICTP for a month in 2011 to advise on the parametrization choices to be implementated in VECTRI for the temperature sensitivities. His extensive knowledge of the malaria literature hugely accelerated the model development process, and Volker is the co-author on the first VECTRI manuscript.

Francesca Di GiuseppeFrancesca di Giuseppe (ECMWF, UK) has a background in modelling radiation interaction within clouds, and has coauthored a number of papers with Adrian Tompkins on this subject. She is now working at ECMWF on the QWeCI project where a new EOF-based spatial bias correction was designed to allow the monthly and seasonal forecast systems to be joined seamlessly. She is now working with ICTP to set up a pilot malaria forecasting system that uses these forecasts to drive VECTRI, which will be tested over Malawi, Uganda and Rwanda with ministry of health partners from the QWeCI and HEALTHY FUTURES projects.




Rachel LoweRachel Lowe (IC3) Rachel Lowe (IC3) was a Visiting Scientist at ICTP for a period of 16 months before moving to IC3 to return to her work on dengue transmission in the Americas within the project DENFREE. She continues to collaborate with ICTP with the analysis of malaria transmission data in Malawi within QWeCI and will be leading the evaluation of the VECTRI-based forecasting system over the region.


NEWS

20/12/2021: VECTRI v1.9 released!!!
NEW features in VECTRI v1.9
This upgrade to the code mostly focuses on improvements to the hydrological scheme. The manual will be upgraded soon to outline these in more detail.
  • Ability to read in externally generated pond fraction from a full hydrological modelling scheme
  • New map of permanent breeding sites using pond edge fraction derived from Sentinal 2 data (20m/150m resolution Africa/global, aggregated to 5km)
  • Correction and relaunch of the revised Asare pond scheme which allows for non-linear runoff and overflow and is validated against in situ observations and high resolution modelling in Ghana and Niger (see Asare et al. 2016a/b)
  • Maps of soil texture used to allow spatially varying infiltration rates according to clay/silt/sand proportions
  • New -v command line option to pass modified paramters to code (avoiding the need to place options in the vectri.options file).

  • Version 1.8.0/1.8.1
    Jan 2020: Diffusion of vectors between gridcells added.
    May 2019, Version 1.7.0 has now been released (May 2019) which introduces a massively simplified interface to make it much easier to run the code with gridded data. The model no longer accepts text file input, only netcdf input is possible (a grib interface is currently under testing). A new (and slowly improving) manual is also available.

    Did you know?

    VECTRI was launched in November 2011 at the ICTP sponsored workshop for Eastern Africa Climate and Impacts at the university of Addis Ababa in Ethiopia.
    VECTRI downloads: