CAPE TOWN, South Africa — In a display of harmony far removed from the bitter politics surrounding global warming, experts from some 100 countries are making progress toward a coordinated system to monitor climate change and hopefully limit its impact.

The Group on Earth Observations aims to link up the myriad satellites, ground stations, radar systems and ocean monitors that often operate in isolation. Working together, the monitoring systems could boost the capacity to predict — and protect against — droughts, floods, hurricanes and disease.

"The goal is to provide the right information in the right format at the right time to the right people so they can make the right decisions," U.S. Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne said Friday during the group's annual conference in Cape Town.

China and Brazil promised to distribute their Earth observation satellite data free to Africa, while the European Union has also launched a project to help Africa close its Earth observation gaps.

Enormous strides in the sharing of technology and pooling of ideas have been made in the past few years. There are tsunami alert systems to prevent a repeat of the 2004 southeast Asian catastrophe that killed 230,000 people.

But the challenges associated with global warming, overpopulation, deforestation and desertification are growing. There are glaring gaps in poor, heavily populated countries and too little overall coordination. The warnings for a recent Bangladesh cyclone came from a Bangladesh-born hurricane expert in the United States who made his own calculations about the impact of the storm and send word home. The 3,500 killed were a fraction of the toll of earlier years.

A Global Earth Observation System was devised in 2005 for completion in 2015 with the aim of allowing access to a vast quantity of information on changes in the Earth's land, oceans, atmosphere and biosphere through a single Web portal.

The system envisages common technical standards to ensure that data emanating from one country can be received and understood in another. One of the items up for discussion Friday was a common alert protocol that would include a single radio frequency for disasters — such as operates for air traffic control.

If authorities were able to predict drought three to six months in advance, this would enable them made decisions on planting crops and water resource allocation way ahead of time.