The Small Earth Nepal in partnership with Department of Hydrology and Meteorology (DHM) and Asian Precipitation – Highly-Resolved Observational Data Integration Towards Evaluation (APHRODITE) project has successfully organized a training workshop on APHORODITE-2. The training was organized in the seminar hall of Department of Hydrology and Meteorology (DHM), Kathmandu. Sixteen participants form different research and academic institutions participated in the training. The intensive 2-day training workshop was facilitated by Prof. Dr. Akio Yatagai and her team from Japan who are also developers of the APHRODITE products.

The main objective of the training was to teach how to integrate locally available meteorological station data to make robust interpolation using AHRODITE algorithm. Therefore, the important prerequisite for participants was to have their own precipitation data. The training was designed to complete in three segments, reformatting of local data to APHRODITE format, quality control of available data and interpolation of the data. However, due to the limited workshop period higher priority was given to quality control.

The APHRODITE-1 project created accurate daily grid precipitation data for the period 1951-2007 over Asian land areas with a high spatial and temporal resolution based on rain-gauge observations which was widely used for monsoon studies, validating satellite estimates and simulated precipitation by climate models. The APHRODITE-2 project started in June 2016 and will continue until March 2019 funded by the Ministry of Environment of Japan. Hirosaki University, Kyoto University and Chiba University are now collaborating for the further development of the APHRODITE algorithm in extending the more data set and with more focus on extreme events. Therefore, as a part of the capacity building for climate researchers from Himalayan region, especially from Nepal, the training was scheduled in Kathmandu.