The Met Office is planning to retire the 12km Africa Limited Area Model (LAM) in September this year. The Africa LAM has been using an old version of the UM for a while and operationally is not performing any better than the global model. All north Africa products will therefore be replaced by the global model, with the Lake Victoria 4km model also available over East Africa.
There are no current plans to run higher resolution over West Africa, our global model will be updated to N768 (~17km) sometime in early 2014.
As a result of the changes the Africa LAM feed on BADC will cease to be updated. The global model feed will still be available on BADC.
The retirement of the Africa LAM is part of a strategic decision to retire all operational 12km resolution regional configurations of the UM at the Met Office over the next few months. As the performance (involving factors such as model science, data assimilation and resolution) of the Met Office's Global UM configuration continues to improve and regional convection-permitting ( less than 5km resolution) domains are now being run for specific regions of interest, there is no longer a clear benefit of running 12km regional configurations operationally.
BADC Helpdesk
July 2013