Welcome to the TAHMO Newsletter!

 

Bamako Mali is an exploding city: the average age is under 16 years, a tiny percentage of the streets are paved, and the green waterways which used to carry the flow from thunderstorms are chock-a-block with new construction (image below: John Selker, Sept 2017, Bamako).  

The opportunity to provide for the ever more intense storms that will pound this city with the storms that arrive from the East is being lost.  Today’s youth with suffer inundations and disease due to lack of planning and administration. Dakar is the San Francisco of Africa.  Projecting to the west-most limit of the African continent, Dakar is bustling, refreshed by the sea, and growing with an unusual degree of order.  Still, a 38 mm of rain that fell in less than an hour was enough to cripple the city for most of a day (images below: John Selker, Sept 8, 2017).

 Dakar has installed classical European inspired drainage infrastructure, but the sediment load of the sand-laden streets means the sub-surface pipe systems are rendered impassable.  Exploring the literature from the past three decades we find a half-dozen articles discussing research on African urban hydrology, with none reporting field data on the functionality of the numerical simulations they present.  Not to understate the challenge of such research:  Even with a collaborative agreement with the Ugandan Meteorological Agency wherein we send all our weather station data to their servers, they will not provide us any data needed for our MS student trying to help evaluate urban hydrology options for Kampala.   

This same week I was in West Africa, Texas was pounded by 1200 mm of rain (yes, 30 times what fell in Dakar), and Irma destroyed islands in the Caribbean with historically intense winds, and is headed straight for Florida where 20% of the population is under evacuation orders as I type. Where was Irma “born? Exactly where I am sitting in Dakar: a collision of wet hot air from Mali, and wind moving up the Atlantic.  So understanding the weather conditions in West Africa translates immediately to America.

Almost no data on current conditions from West Africa is available to global simulation models. That is about to change, with our 500 stations running by December more than doubling the globally available weather observations for the continent. The Trans-African Hydro-Meteorological Observatory currently has 150 stations sending data, and will have over 500 sending data by December.  Plans are for 30 stations in Mali, 20 in Senegal, 30 in Benin, 30 in Togo, 20 in Cameroon, 50 in Nigeria, and 80 in Ghana: 260 stations with 5-minute resolution data from the path of Irma. Will this stop future Irma’s from happening?  Not in the short term, but perhaps, as we can impress people who own houses and hotels in Florida that climate change is on their doorstep, we can be part of the solution. Immediately we can help those tasked with protecting lives and property the information they need to make accurate and timely warnings. This is all in the context of the number of reporting weather stations in Africa having dropped by about a factor of ten between 1950 and the present. 

The most remarkable part of this story is that the progress we are making is undertaken with the full agreement of the local meteorological offices.  Placing weather stations and sending the data around the world is an activity that is rightly controlled by the host countries. It is a matter of sovereignty, but that has led to gridlock in data access.  You see, in the past there was no realistic mechanism for the over 40 countries of the sub-Sahel to address the diverse emerging market for their critical data.  How would Weather.com access data from The Gambia that was not even on-line?  How would the global modeling community do the same?  What about the insurance industry? The value of climate data for Africa is not exactly known, but typically estimated to be north of US$50B/yr. For TAHMO to install and operate 2,000 weather stations across this region for would cost US$5M up-front, and US$2M/yr thereafter to maintain the network.  So conservatively we are looking at a value proposition of 2000 to 1 in returns.  We can make that work by putting in place game-changers in the business model and technology. The key points: leverage the cell-phone network, leverage the sensor revolution, leverage the internet for data transfer. There is nothing fundamentally new here except the realization that this will work and the hard work to put it all together.

I never fail to be blown away by the dedication of African meteorologists. They are serious, well-trained, productive people working under unbelievable limitations. They start skeptical of TAHMO, but then are willing to give us a chance, because they see that among all the offers that they get from around the world for hardware and short-courses, this is the one that specifically seeks a long-term sustainable solution that will give them the data they need to serve their people (image below: members of the Senegal team working with TAHMO, photo John Selker).  TAHMO is like any other new effort a gamble, but with more than 20 countries in our fold, and soon the largest stream of African weather data, it seems that it is about to pay off for Africa, and the folks in the path of Irma.

On 14 July 2017, the first weather station in Johannesburg that is part of TAHMO was opened in  Braamfontein, in the centre of town. A total of 10 stations, sponsored by IBM, will be opened up in the coming few months, mainly at fire stations throughout Johannesburg. The Emergency Management Services of the City of Johannesburg are welcoming the stations, as Johannesburg has to deal with floods regularly. The climate change adaptation programme of the City is also welcoming. TAHMO is in the process of engaging SAWS and the City with formalizing Memoranda of Understanding. This first station was opened at the Maths Centre, where it will also be used to teach Maths, Science and Technology teachers in South Africa, how to use it in their lessons, to not only improve climate awareness but also practical physics and geography knowledge. The start in the City of Johannesburg for the proof-of-concept can show how TAHMO can work in an urban environment, where the weather has a high economic impact on designs and on the operations of city services and businesses, as well as traffic management and safety of citizens. The opening ceremony started with talks at IBM Research, then moved to the roof of the Maths Centre, in the same street. Participants in the celebration came from the City of Johannesburg, SAWS, Agricultural Research Council, Gauteng City Region Observatory, Gauteng Province, Tshwane Municipality, IBM, Maths Centre, University of the Witwatersrand, University of Johannesburg, CSIR and consultancy firms involved in water management in Johannesburg or Southern Africa.

By John Selker - September 2017
 

The TAHMO weather station, built by METER, seeks to achieve our high reliability and low maintenance requirements by employing no moving parts.  The two most notable parameters which are involved in this technology are the wind speed and the rainfall. We thought it would be of interest to share more about these technologies continue to evolve.

While these measurements are based on simple physics, they must work under every condition found in Africa! For example, what if the TAHMO station is right beside a train track where ear-splitting brakes might swamp any acoustic signal?  It is exactly these kinds of issues that made us realize that if we were going to use a novel sensor system, we had to make extensive tests in the field.  The folks at METER started testing these sensor systems almost 10 years ago, and TAHMO put out its first test stations in Senegal five years ago.  Not a month goes by without re-analysis of the station data looking for opportunities to improve performance.

We congratulate John Selker who has been honored as distinguished Professor at the Oregon State University. This is the highest academic honor the University can bestow on a faculty member. The full press release can be read here. Below is a link to the lecture where John is honored, and a link to the video about his work in Africa.

John Participated in the AMCOMET meeting in Addis Ababa September 11-15.  This meeting had directors of Meteorology from every country in Africa, as well as ministers of environment and other governmental officials.  This gave exceptional opportunity to meet directors from Chad, Uganda, Botswana, Senegal, Benin, Mali, Cameroon, and Madagascar, as well as the WMO head of programs in Africa, and the directors of the Nile Basin Authority and Volta Basin Authority.  John served on a panel before the entire conference where he was given 7 minutes to present TAHMO in general, and the TAHMO model was very well received.  Remarkably, the TAHMO model was point-by-point in line with the recommendations of the AMCOMET.  There was a great deal of excitement in the room as they saw that this was not a dream, but a reality. TAHMO is addressing a broad swath of the goals of the countries, AMCOMET, and the donor community.  Regardless of other outcomes, TAHMO has already changed the expectations, showing that the observation of Africa is indeed possible.  John also gave a 1 hr session specifically presenting the results of the Bellagio meeting, and presenting the TAHMO model.  This meeting was attended by about 1/3 of the meeting participants, with the room being full.

Sometimes we are asked about how TAHMO functions, what the business model is, who has to pay for data and who has access for free. Please have a look at the Frequently Asked Questions on the TAHMO site for answers. If you have additional questions, do not hesitate to contact us at info@tahmo.org.