NETWAT Kick-off was held on February 2 and 3, 2023 at Le Bourget du Lac, on the INES-CEA site.
This two-day meeting allowed the NETWAT collective gathered at Le Bourget du Lac and in remote, especially for our African partners to better know each other better, to share the socio-environmental issues related to the project (access to electricity, the dust cycle in West Africa, the evolution of water resources), to identify our links with the TENERRDIS energy transition competitiveness (…)

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The 7th edition of the International Conference Energy & Meteorology (ICEM) took place near Padova, Italy, from June 27th to June 29th, 2023. This year’s conference centered around the theme “Towards climate-resilient energy systems”. Over 150 participants converged in person to take part in three immersive days of plenary sessions, parallel discussions, poster presentations, workshops, and networking opportunities, all set in a relaxed and intellectually stimulating atmosphere. (…)

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On 23 November 2023, a training session on the installation and use of SoilRatio, developed by Lysi, was held at the INES CEA Lac du Bourget site.
SoilRatio, Fig.1, is used to measure the degree of soiling of panels and its impact on photovoltaic production. The data is sent by FTP via a SIM card. An application enables the parameters to be set remotely.
This system will be deployed by the LISA team in Bambey (Senegal) in March 2024.
Figure 1 : the SoilRatio system
Figure 2 : Eric (…)

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On October 18, 2024, Léo CLAUZEL defended his thesis entitled “ Contribution of desert dust to the estimation of the photovoltaic resource in West Africa during the dry season”.
His work contributed to NETWAT-WP3 (Building Reliable Decision-Making Tools to Manage Power Grids), and provided a better understanding of how interactions between desert aerosols and radiation or clouds modify the solar resource.
Léo set up the WRF-CHIMERE coupled model, and studied two mineral dust events (…)

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Key developments

Key developments WP2 - Improving our understanding of dust deposition in West Africa Bambey site operational since July 2024
Initial observations show i) perfect reproducibility between the 2 panels, ii) a good correlation between the panels cleaned every week (cumulated over the two weeks) and the panels cleaned every 15 days, and iii) deposition measurements on the panels consistent with those on the frisbee, lower as expected. WP3-Build reliable decision-making tools to manage (…)

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As part of WP3-NETWAT, in connection with Léo Clauzel’s PhD (Clauzel, L., 2024, PhD UGA), we compared the GHI simulated with three models (WRF-Only ; WRF-Solar ; WRF-CHIMERE) for the two dust events studied in Léo’s thesis (Bodélé ; Atlas-Bodélé, cf L. Clauzel’s thesis). This work follows recent work by Sawadogo et al (2023) for Ghana. This study was carried out as part of Lilian Renou’s internship (Renou, L., 2024).
Taking dust into account is thus becoming increasingly complex : (…)

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In 2025, Amy Banigo and Amélie Solbès presented their PhD’s projects at ERCA (European Research Course on the Atmosphere) and at the General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union (EGU).
ERCA is a winter school on the atmosphere in Grenoble, bringing together PhD students from all over Europe and beyond, and focusing on a different theme each year. This year at ERCA, the focus was on the study of aerosols, echoing the scientific questions developed in NETWAT. Participants also carried (…)

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Amy Banigo presented the results of her doctoral thesis during the “Energy Meteorology” session (Session 2.1 “Energy Resources and Environment”) at EGU26, as an oral presentation.
The topic of her presentation was “Simulating Atmospheric Dust Impact on Photovoltaic Performance : A sensitivity analysis to guide modeling choices in a data-scarce region (1).”
Although the subject is very specific compared to other more general topics covered at EGU, Amy was able to exchange ideas with a few (…)

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Amy Solbès presented her research (Solbès et al., 2026) at EGU 2026 during the session on energy meteorology (ERE2.1), organized by the Energy, Resources, and Environment (ERE) disciplinary session.
Her presentation focused on the influence of different aerosol optical depth datasets on WRF-Solar’s prediction of horizontal global irradiance for solar energy in West Africa.
She also participated in various sessions on weather forecasting, the use of artificial intelligence in meteorology (…)

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