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Welcome to the TAHMO Newsletter!

Welcome to the TAHMO Newsletter! This is our way of bringing the TAHMO community up-to-date with our progress, and to let you know about neat opportunities to get involved with the TAHMO program.

Crowd-funding project: Every Meter Counts

METER Group, Inc. USA, supplier of measurement technology, has launched a funding app that lets anyone participate in the TAHMO initiative and its aim to achieve a network of a total of 20,000 weather stations in Africa.

Every five kilometre (US$ 3) that you run and every thirty kilometre (US$ 5) that you ride on your bicycle are valuable through this app. Not only for you, but also for scientists, farmers, fishermen, malaria fighters and government agencies in Africa. Because when you download their free app, the Meter Group donates these dollars for your meters to TAHMO. Learn more about the app and other ways you can get involved at meter.ly/tahmo657c.
Are you going out for a run? Or are you going to hop on your bicycle? Download the app and contribute to a better climate. Because Every Meter Counts! 

TAHMO in Kenya – January, 2017: a sweep of opportunities

In January TAHMO leadership (CEO Frank Annor and co-Director John Selker) made an intensive visit to Kenya.  Visits were made to IBM Research, Simlaw Seed, University of Nairobi, Stratmore University, iHub, The Ministry of Education, the Kenyan Meteorological Department, two schools with TAHMO stations, The global resilience Program, RCMRD, African Climate Policy Centre, Greenpot Enterprises, and Ecobank.  Many new initiatives were started, including the goal of making TAHMO educational materials and data part of the national program under the ministry of education.

Kenya Overview

Many words are employed regarding preparations for climate change: resilience; monitoring; capacity building.  These top down tautologies resonate with donors and academics, but one wonders if they find traction when they come down to earth.
 
An alternative approach is bottom up, from the earth, feeling the weight of the peoples struggles - the actual burden, and testing a diversity of strategies, on the ground, to incrementally lighten this load.  Orthodoxy is replaced by experimentally verified field results.  Outcomes are measured against metrics of success: those activities that perform are refined and amplified, and those that do not find traction are shed. This is classical engineering methodology applied to climate preparedness.  Here we summarize our current empirical findings in Kenya.

Education
3 hours of driving took us from the verdant forests of Nairobi to the heat of the Great Rift Valley.  Subtle gestures of the wispy Massai shepherds guide endless ribbons of animals through the drought-ravaged landscape.  The newspaper announced this week that 2 million Kenyans are on the brink of starvation in the current drought.  Jostling off the road, the tidy green gates of the Tipis Girls School starkly contrast the windswept land.  The principle of the school was welcoming, but confused by this entourage of professors, cameras, and business men with interest in this remote haven.  Then we met the students.  The girls were bright-eyed and educated – with a dedication to learning born from the fact that only great skill and insight could take them from subsistence to thrive. 14-18 years old, they excitedly explained the role of each sensor on the weather station, and how it worked, and what it revealed.  Math, physics, soils, weather, statistics woven to reveal the connections between science, climate, agriculture, and opportunity. What to us was a nifty weather station to these students and teachers is a concrete connection to the technology, concerns, and solutions to the issues of their generation.  But so much more was needed: relevant training materials, and critically, a way to connect their intellectual understanding to their own verdant trajectory.  “Tell us about jobs and careers that are out there – we don’t know at all.  Are there opportunities in geography? I love geography.”
 
The next day at the Mangu boy’s high school, once again the students crowded the treasured station, and they explained each sensor to us. Along the winding conversation we talked about how the data from the solar sensor told us how much energy was being generated by the solar panel, which is matched exactly to the battery bank. Their eyes went wide when they recognized that they had just understood all of the basics of solar power based on their own station.  A boy’s dream to be an electrical engineer crystalized an actionable exciting path.  He had recited Ohms Law and the Power Equation, but today he had turned the notions into knowledge.
 
At Strathmore University in Nairobi the Information and Computational Technology (ICT) team is ready to tackle any complex task, and the idea of putting out an app that would fit their farmer and student communities evokes a lean-forward let’s get this done response.

Business
Agriculture in Africa generates 1/6th the harvest per area as in the USA, and employs more than half of the labor.  We learned why.  The farmers have no information about when it might rain, so plant conservatively, and often harvest at the first chance rather than the optimal moment.  Disease takes down their crops before they even know to take action. From an agricultural entrepreneur: “How can we identify the right land and right crops without knowing the climate?  Why should we, or anyone else invest?” From the National Seed Producer “Without weather and climate data, how can we compete with the giant seed companies?  We have the expertise, tractors, land, and distribution, but the drought cost us our entire seed crop because we had no idea it was coming.”

Governance and Social Institutions
The Meteorological campus covers most of a square kilometer of weathered colonial offices and 1970’s donor-built dormitories.  The dissonance from our field trips was deafening: how is it that the very institution capable of providing critical information to farmers and students is lost in time - unable to address the problem which forms their mandate?  The Meteorological Department was once respected, but now struggling to be seen.  We must realize that climate change is subtle compared to how the world of Meteorology has been turned on its head in the past decade.  Once authoritative statements that tomorrow expect rain with 30% chance, have been replaced by smartphones that tell us not only what to expect at 12:15 PM when we leave for lunch, but what to expect next week as well.  “We are supposed to run secure servers and buy super computers to run 3-dimensional models which can feed-out graphics to smartphones.  We are meteorologists, not computer scientists! We have the people in the field – we can disseminate weather and climate insights to our country.”  The Ministry of Education has made the decision to put real-world learning at the core of Kenyan education, and has seen that the TAHMO data have been transformative in the science, math, and geographic education at the 28 schools hosting stations.  TAHMO decides to place stations in each and every one of the 47 counties in Kenya, and make data available to every school child in the country for their county.

Synergy in place of stagnation
What if educators taught children science and geography based on lessons developed by meteorologists?  What if computer scientists managed the meteorological observations, embodied and transmitting the wisdom of the meteorologists?   What if meteorologists spent their time teaching farmers how to use these data?  In isolation, the meteorologist is irrelevant, in community with educators and computational experts, they are the lynch pin.
 
TAHMO develops the on-the-ground collaborative relationships, provides cutting edge instrumentation and a sustainable financial backbone for long-term weather observation. IBM assimilates these data with supporting data from digital landscapes, satellite measurements, and numerical weather models to generate world-class forecasts, and applications to present these complex data in compelling forms at the tips of a farmers fingers.  Kenyan Meteorologists feed out these products to farmers, businesses, schools and churches, training the community how to translate forecasts into decisions.  The climate of Africa is observed.  Meteorologists gain prestige and revenue.  For the first time a complete record of African climate is curated – the key to the future of human food production in the 21st century.

TAHMO at EGU and IAHS

Interest in TAHMO in the scientific community remains large. This is why there are lectures and presentations about TAHMO at many international scientific conferences. From 21 – 28 April, there will be the General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna, Austria. This large conference with over 14,000 participants attracts people from all over the world. On Thursday 27 April, there will be an oral presentation about TAHMO under the title: “Recent developments in the Trans-African Hydro-Meteorological Observatory (TAHMO)”. The abstract can be found here: https://goo.gl/KvmHJU . Later this Summer, from 10-14 July, TAHMO will be presented at the IAHS Scientific Assembly in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. TAHMO will be presented in the MOXXI session “Measurements in the 21st century: innovation in hydrological observations” as well as at the  Geosciences Information for Teachers (GIFT) workshop.

Ground Truth 2.0

The Ground Truth 2.0 initiative, is an EU funded H2020 project that involves 6 demonstration cases (4 in Europe and 2 in Africa) that revolve around building of Citizen Observatories. A Citizen Observatory can be defined as a platform on which citizens and other stakeholders are engaged in the collection, processing, use and evaluation of data, tools and information to promote socio-economic development.
 
The Kenyan demonstration case involves developing a sustainable initiative around crowdsourcing of biodiversity data that will be made useful in several formats for specific audiences. Current partners are UNESCO-IHE, TAHMO and Upande, who are closely working together with National Museums of Kenya, African Conservation Center, GLOBE, Kenya Meteorological Department, the Narok County and a host of other stakeholders. By participating in the development of the Kenyan Citizen Observatory, citizens, policy makers and data aggregators (scientists) will be able to play vital roles in defining how biodiversity data can and should be collected, packaged and made useful for communities, schools and conservation organizations.
The first Kenya Demo Case workshop was organized at Talek, Narok County in Kenya on the 28th of March, 2017. This workshop had 18 different stakeholders attending who saw the need to balance livelihood and sustainable management of biodiversity as the man challenge in the Maasai Mara ecosystem. The citizen observatory will therefore focus on this issue. The project is for 3 years and started in September, 2016.

The Global Resilience Partnership Project in Uganda

TAHMO is coordinating a pilot project with contributions from partners [Earth Networks (EN), Climate Change Adaptation Innovation (CHAI), Human Network International (HNI), the African Centres for Lightning and Electromagnetics (ACLENet) and the Uganda National Meteorological Authority (UNMA)] in Uganda. The project is funded by the Global Resilience Partnership with the main aim to develop and disseminate accurate and timely severe weather information to vulnerable groups in Uganda so their resilience can be increased. The platform for the dissemination of the information is already in place via the 161 platform launched with the support of Airtel Uganda in August 2016. Airtel is offering the weather related information to their subscribers free of charge and on-demand to promote customer loyalty. The project has a total of 35 state of the art, low-cost Automatic Weather Stations (AWS) for selected areas of Uganda.  Other 35 stations are planned for Kenya and Tanzania to increase the coverage over Lake Victoria. These stations will provide the data needed to drive the early warning system and extend it beyond Uganda to Kenya and Tanzania.
 
The information provided on the 161 platform is grouped into two (2): the Static Content which consist of advice on how to prepare for various weather conditions (this is a pull service) and the Dynamic Content which has two parts: a 6-days weather forecasts by region (pull service) and an Emergency weather alerts (a push service which will be officially launched with UNMA this month - April).  An assessment of 6000 subscribers of the 161 platform preferences to severe weather information shows that most citizens are interested in heavy rains and thunder and lightning storms. The project partners are happy that these needs are being addressed through this project.
Sample Subscribers Preferences for Severe Weather Information (HNI, 2017)

TAHMO signs Memorandum of Collaborations

Since August 2016 TAHMO has managed to expand their collaborations within Mali, Benin, Burkina Faso and Togo. Through the signing of Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the National Meteorological Services of these countries, TAHMO will expand their network of Automatic Weather Stations. Within the next couple months it is planned that 10 stations will be installed in Burkina Faso, 35 in Benin, 35 in Togo and 30 in Mali.
 
TAHMO is currently also working on the development of a collaboration with the National Meteorological Service in Cote d’Ivoire, Cameroon and Tanzania.
Signing of MoU by the Director of the Togo National Meteorological Service.

News from our Partners

MeterGroup Blog on TAHMO:  

Weather data, used for flight safety, disaster relief, crop and property insurance, and emergency services, contributes over $30 billion in direct value to U.S. consumers annually. Since the 1990’s in Africa, however, there’s been a consistent decline in the availability of weather observations. Most weather stations are costly and require highly trained individuals to maintain. As a result, weather stations in African countries have steadily declined over the last seventy years. Oregon State University’s, Dr. John Selker and his partners intend to remedy the problem through his latest endeavor— the Trans African Hydro Meteorological Observatory (TAHMO). Read more...

Severe Weather Consult (SWC) on Severe Weather Monitoring of Floods and Lightning in Rwanda

We, Severe Weather Consult (SWC) are in Rwanda implementing a weather monitoring and dissemination system, an important platform that will contribute to food security and mitigate the effect of climate change.
 
In the project titled “Severe Weather Monitoring of Floods and Lightning”, SWC and TAHMO will jointly install AWSs in Rwanda while Lightning detectors will be independently developed and installed. Our system works with innovative low-cost lightning detectors to track lightning strikes of an area and produce alerts. By integrating lightning data with other weather parameters (rain, wind, temperature, humidity, solar radiation and air pressure), a detailed data set of weather information is created, which improves the predictive power for severe weather events. All the data will be uploaded online, information developed and sent to users in near real time. 
 
SWC believes on a bottom-up approach and continuously sharing and learning from our product users.  Farm sites mapping and validation is one of the activities being carried out by SWC to build the capacity of farmers in applying and improving best practices along the whole agricultural value chain. In this program, we selected 12 sectors in Musanze District where Earth Observation and health training for food security are being carried out.
 
In Mid March, our Agronomist participated in Soil Health training day in Musanze, an event we jointly organized with Holland Green Tech (HGT) Soil care.  The training day was meant to support farmers in Musanze district overcome, mitigate soil testing related challenges and ensure the increase of production and food security.
Copyright © 2017 TAHMO Foundation, All rights reserved.


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