This page shows the AA trigger activation status for the South Ethiopia Region of Ethiopia in the 2026 Mar-Apr-May season, based on the forecast issued in Jan.
As of Jan, the regional status for anticipatory action in the 2026 Mar-Apr-May season is:
According to the Anticipatory Action Plan, actions triggered on the basis of this information include the following:
Click on the woredas on the map to the left to see their name and status. You can toggle the display of various data related to the forecast, observational conditions and trigger status by hovering over the “Layers” button on the top right of the map.
This dashboard monitors the status of forecast-based anticipatory action in the South Ethiopia Region of Ethiopia.
For a sensitivity analysis of the AA Protocol, click the “Trigger Sensitivity” tab. To see previously issued forecasts for the 2026 Mar-Apr-May season, click the “Previous Months” tab. For more details on which actions have been activated according to the Anticipatory Action Plan, click the “AA Protocol Actions” tab. For information on the current forecast by woreda, click the “Woreda Info” tab. Finally, click the “Historical Info” tab for past years’ forecasts.
For technical notes on this month’s forecast, including any correction decisions made, please consult the EMI Anticipatory Action Wiki.
The Jan issue forecast has the following historical skill, in terms of triggering during past humanitarian drought emergencies:
The Forecast-Based Anticipatory Action Plan is triggered according to the following rule.
Further technical details about the AAP, including full historical information by woreda, are available in the Metrics Appendix. To explore the forecast in greater detail, as well as other sources of climate data, consult the AA Design Tool.
For each year, 1991-present, the IRI forecast database retrieves the forecasted probability of non-exceedence associated with the chosen Frequency. For example, the forecast probability at 25% frequency indicates the likelihood during a given year that cumulative MAM precipitation will be at least as dry as the 25th percentile in the historical record, or roughly a 1/4 year drought.
The IRI database calculates the Threshold for triggering action. This is also based on the Frequency; for example, at the 25% frequency, the threshold is set such that the most probable 1/4th of forecasts in the historical record would have triggered action.
To account for the fact that consecutive seasons of drought can have compounding affects in arid areas like South Ethiopia Region, an adjustments is made to the forecast threshold.
The forecast probability for a given year is compared against the adjusted Threshold. If it is equal to or higher than the Threshold, anticipatory action is triggered for that month. If it is less than the Threshold, no action is taken that month.
This process is followed for each forecast issue month - December, January and February.
The AA protocol is based on a binary trigger - if the drought forecast is above a given threshold of confidence (described in the previous section), it triggers; if it is below this threshold, it does not.
To test how sensitive the protocol is to the exact threshold values chosen, this section presents an uncertainty analysis. This analysis is based on the method of re-estimating the trigger threshold with years randomly omitted from the historical record. Repeating this procedure many times gives us an estimated distribution of how much the threshold might be expected to vary due to sampling error.
In this case, we run 1,000 iterations of the re-sampling process. In each iteration, we draw a sample of equal size to the original data comprised of randomly sampled blocks of 5 consecutive years, sampled with replacement. The block width of 5 was chosen here to account for the timescale of common sources of interannual correlation like ENSO.
The cumulative distribution of hindcasts is shown by the black slope. The empirical trigger threshold is shown by the dotted red vertical line. The CDF of bootstrapped replicates of the trigger threshold is shown by the blue slope.
If the current forecast is outside of the sensitivity range, this indicates that we have statistically robust evidence that the forecasted conditions are above or below the threshold. If the current forecast falls within the sensitivity range, this indicates that we should interpret the trigger result for the current season with caution as the appearance of trigger-worth conditions could be occurring just by chance.
[1] "This forecast has not been issued yet."
[1] "This forecast has not been issued yet."To minimize the potential for mis-triggering, the AA Technical Working Group has designated certain actions to only trigger if multiple months of issued forecasts have passed the threshold. You can find the cumulative action criteria below, with the current status (according to the region-level average forecast) highlighted.
Use the “filter” box below each column to search for specific records. You can also download the data in full by pressing the “Copy” or “CSV” buttons.
Use the “filter” box below each column to search for specific records. You can also download the data in full by pressing the “Copy” or “CSV” buttons.