The International Workshop on Rainfall Measurement Based on Microwave (MW) links from Commercial Cellular Communication Networks (Rain Cell) was held in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, from 30 March to 2 April 2015. The workshop's main objective was to build awareness and provide training on a technique that can provide accurate rainfall mapping in areas with poor rain gauge or weather radar coverage. The workshop brought together 87 participants representing research centers and weather services from 18 countries. A subgroup of 30 workshop participants followed a 2-day technical training course that covered in detail the physics of microwave attenuation by rain, other sources of signal fluctuations such as wet antennas, signal processing techniques to detect wet and dry periods and quantify rain-induced attenuation, and quantitative rain-rate estimation from microwave attenuation.

The countries around the Mediterranean basin face water problems, including water shortages and floods, that can impact food availability, cause epidemics, and threaten life and infrastructures. These problems are due to a combination of inadequate planning and management policies and of poor capability to predict hydrometeorological and climatic hazards. The Mediterranean Sea acts as a moisture and heat source for the atmosphere through air sea fluxes, so that energetic mesoscale features are present in the atmospheric circulation, which can evolve to high-impact weather systems, such as heavy precipitation and flash flooding. Floods also occur at times on the southern side of the Mediterranean Sea, as in October 2008 over the northeastern region of Morocco, in November 1968 in Tunisia, and in Algiers, Algeria, on November 10, 2001, causing 886 victims.