Considering projected climate scenarios and socio-economic development for sub-Saharan Africa, the overall challenge in the southern African region is to secure water at sufficient quality and quantity for both, the stability of ecosystems with their functions and services as well as for human wellbeing. Many countries of southern Africa face inadequate weather monitoring networks to provide reliable information for the development of efficient management strategies for sustainable water and land resources management, drought and flood risk analysis and forecasts as well as climate change impacts assessments. For example, large areas in Angola, Botswana and Zambia are barely monitored, thus, there is a strong need to improve existing national weather monitoring networks in order to provide reliable, consistent and up-to-date information for research, decision making authorities, stakeholders and the wider public. As a joint effort of Angola, Botswana, Germany, Namibia, South Africa and Zambia, the SASSCAL Initiative (Southern African Science Service Centre for Climate Change and Adaptive Land Management; www.sasscal.org) addresses this deficit and extends existing national monitoring networks in order to provide a consistent data set at regional scale. Funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), altogether 67 weather stations of the SASSCAL WeatherNet provide accessible near-real time data of major climatological variables as well as up-to-date statistics for the SASSCAL region.