The R30 million project funding was granted by the Japanese Science and Technology Agency (JST) and the Japanese International Cooperation Agency (JICA) through an agreement with the South African Department of Science and Technology (DST). In South Africa the project is coordinated by the newly established national Applied Centre for Climate and Earth System Sciences (ACCESS), where Prof Rautenbach also serves on the steering committee.

In the project the most advanced coupled ocean-atmosphere climate model in the world (Sintex-F), developed by the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), will be used to generate climate forecasts of up to one year in advance. JAMSTEC hosts one of the biggest computers in the world, called the Earth Simulater, which be used for these model simulations. As part of the project, UP will soon receive a powerful computer that will be used for research in generating regional climate forecasts over the Limpopo Province from Sintex-F data. The project was launched during August when Prof Toshio Yamagata (Dean of the Graduate School of Science, University of Tokyo) and a large delegation from Japan visited South Africa, including the University of Pretoria.