31 October 2015
The water level on the gauge of Mopti reached this year its peak on 27 October and remained for five days on the same level of 622 cm. While the water level in Mopti will decrease again from early November onwards, the flood level will still increase in the central part of Inner Niger Delta for some weeks and in the northern Inner Niger Delta still during the entire month November.
The prediction of the flood level by OPIDIN was this year accurate again. We hope to further improve OPIDIN by making a better use of the on-line satellite data of the daily rainfall in the Niger Basin. The prediction of the flood level by OPIDIN can never be very accurate, however, because the model is based on the most recent daily measurements of the water level in Mopti in combination with the daily rainfall estimates in the upper Bani and upper Niger during the foregoing weeks, and thus does not take into account the still unknown rainfall in the catchment area in the following weeks. That is also the reason why OPIDIN can never produce an accurate prediction in the early raining season. Global predictions of the expected rainfall in the coming weeks are used, however, as global background information in the bulletins.
It took some time before the website www.opidin.org was found by the potential users. The website was launched in June 2013, with 30 visits in June 2013, 151 visits in July 2013, 199 visits in Augustus and 155 in September. In 2014, there were in June - September 151, 238, 250 and 257 visits, respectively and this year 1444, 1091, 624 and 408 visits in the same four months. That the number of visitors reach a peak in June-September, was to be expected assuming that people visit the site to know the predicted flood level in the months before the actual peak is reached in October - November. For the same reason, OPIDIN is less often visited between October and May.
So far, the OPIDIN site had 8865 visits by - in total - 7054 users. Many users visited the site only once (spending on average 57 seconds on the site), - apparently mostly people searching for something different. In contrast, returning visitors remained, on average, 313 seconds on the site during a visit. Last three years there were 160 users which visited the site at least 30 times.
When the visitors are split up per country, there were still more visitors in Europe than in West Africa, but when a selection is made per city, most users were found in Bamako, Mali.
Still 97% of the visitors used a desktop and not more than 2.3% a smartphone and 0.7% a tablet. A fast increase of the smartphone users is to be expected as soon as smartphones will become more generally used in Mali.
