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This March, Leah Tai headed to East Africa with two new weather stations to join Zachary Dunn, the East Africa Field Coordinator, and install sensors with partners in the School-2-School program. Homa Bay High, a large school with over 1,000 students that sits near the coast of Lake Victoria, was the site of the first installation. Fishing is a main livelihood in the coastal area, and when the region’s rainy season starts in April the grain farming sector starts booming.

Homa Bay High’s partner school, Timberline High is a large school in Boise, Idaho, where students are focusing on building Arduino-based weather stations to compare with national weather reports. The weather station installation at Homa Bay High allows students to use their new computer lab and check the local weather conditions in their front yard, comparing them to regional weather reports from the Kenya Met Service and sending the information to their partner school in Boise, Idaho.

Leah and Zach are heading to Ombeyi High School next week to install their weather station and introduce students at Ombeyi High to their partner school, Capital High in Idaho. After installing the stations at each school, physics, geography, and math teachers are shown how to access the data through an online portal at www.TAHMO.org, here they can download their site’s data and allow students to track changes over time. Resources on using the data in classroom activities are provided by TAHMO, and teachers are encouraged to brainstorm new practical applications and share them through the website with one another.

TAHMO is working on various aspects: developing a better weather station; educating young people in Africa about climate change by providing schools with an educational program and; developing local business cases with local entrepreneurs to cover the running costs of the weather stations, data collecting and data assimilation to ensure a sustainable future for the project. Last month, some of the TAHMO team members went to Ghana to work on developing business models together with local partners. In two weeks many potential business models have been generated, validated, prototyped, and evaluated.

In Ghana, TAHMO partnered up with a young social enterprise called Farmerline. They are a technology product company building supply chain and value chain solutions to integrate agricultural outputs of rural farmers in Africa/emerging markets. In Ghana, Farmerline will be responsible for ‘packaging’ the climate data generated by TAHMO into a product that needs to reach 10.000 small-holder cocoa farmers in a year and a half.

Boukje Vastbinder (TU Delft) was asked to help with the kick-off of the business case development and prepared a 4-day workshop to help plan the business case development process. Their findings can be found below.

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One of TAHMO’s main objectives is to bring hands-on, exploratory, and cross-cultural educational opportunities to African students, where low-resource environments require creative methods of promoting STEM (Science Technology Engineering Mathematics) education. TAHMO integrates environmental sensing into the classroom by installing on-site weather stations at schools, allowing students to access real-time data from sensors monitoring their very own front yard. Now TAHMO is launching S2S Lesson Plans, a suite of lesson guides spanning weather, climate, earth science, physics, design, and business concepts for teachers around the world. S2S lesson plans will help strengthen the capacity of teachers to utilize their weather data and inspire citizen science projects between partner schools.

In March, Leah Tai visited a Kenyan Ministry of Education training session in Kisumu, Kenya, to meet with principals and teachers and share TAHMO’s new lesson plan resources. Several geography, physics, math, and biology teachers provided feedback about a sample of TAHMO’s new materials. Leah conducted informal interviews with teachers discussing practical activities they already incorporate into their teaching, identifying priority areas for creating new lesson plan content, and brainstorming ideas for new activities together.

The S2S Program will continue to create lesson plans for teachers while also compiling successful ideas from teachers in Africa, the USA, and the Netherlands. Want to know more about the S2S lesson plans? Have a look at these examples: The Carbon Cycle – The Weight of Air and Air Pressure – Acoustic Rain Gauge or send an email to s2s@tahmo.org.

In another remarkable success, in early February 2015, TAHMO was selected as one of 16, from over 500 applicants, for the Rockefeller Foundation/USAID “Global Resilience Challenge”. This project will be carried forward as a team, with partners including Earthnetworks (USA), African Centres for Lightning and Electromagnetics (ACLE, Uganda), Uganda Chartered Healthnet, and Human Network International (USA).

The project will start by defining the current situation with extreme weather losses (including over 3,000 deaths from lightning per year in the area surrounding Lake Victoria alone), moving then to laying out a practical and sustainable solution. TAHMO’s proposal includes an Early Warning System (EWS) development and validation project in Uganda. This EWS will detect and alert heavy weather events so agricultural production can be improved and industry and services are protected. The grant is provided in a series of stages, which if successful will yield over US$1,2M to the effort. During stage 2 of the Global Resilience Partnership, teams will propose solutions and implementation plans. The final winners of the second stage will receive a grant to implement and scale up their solutions in each region. This will be announced in September this year.

The Global Forum for Innovations in Agriculture has invited TAHMO to host a Forum on advances in climate observations for enhanced food security in Africa.  The event took place on March 10th in Abu Dhabi and included panelists John Selker and Nick van de Giesen (co-Directors of TAHMO), as well as speakers from Kenya and Switzerland.  This put TAHMO in the spotlight for its leadership in continent-scale observations in Africa.  The speakers addressed not only the importance to farmers, but also the commercial viability of these observations, illustrating the unique financial model employed by TAHMO to sustainably make timely and accurate climate observations available to scientists, governments, and farmers across the continent.

The first generation of TAHMO stations has now been in the field for 2 years in Senegal, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, and South Africa.  During this entire time, we have been working closely with the people in the field as well as the station manufacturer to develop the next level of station performance.  The second generation of stations is expected to go to the field in January 2015!  A business-card-sized solar pane will have enough power to report every hour, around the clock, with a backup battery power sufficient for 3 months, just in case.  The station will have an internal barometer, a sonic anemometer that can measure low winds also far below the WMO standard, and a rain gauge that has no moving parts and 0.014 mm resolution that are over 10 times better than the WMO guidelines request, and the sonic wind speed sensor resolves down to 0.01 m/s.  In June the design will be consolidated into a single compact cylinder.

Following the official kick-off in Stockholm Sweden, the Securing Water For Food (SWFF) project is taking off.  The final contract was signed on November 21, 2014, and Zachary Dunn (TAHMO’s East Africa Field Director) will be starting his three-year SWFF-funded effort in Kenya starting January 1, 2015.   In the first year, the SWFF funding allows for the purchase of up to 25 stations, moving to 65 stations per year in the second and third years.  The project includes Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi.  We are seeking customers for the East African data, and are currently in discussions with several significant potential clients.

The UNDP, under funding from the Global Environmental Facility (GEF), has launched a project entitled “Climate Information for Resilient Development and Adaptation to Climate Change in Africa” (CIRDA).  TAHMO has been invited to both of the kick-off workshops of CIRDA (Ethiopia in April, and Tanzania in October), and now has been invited to put pilot stations in each of the 11 CIRDA countries ( Benin, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, the Gambia, Liberia, Malawi, Sao Tome and Principe, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia).  TAHMO will place up to 5 stations per country in schools as part of the School-2-School program.

Over the coming three years, CIRDA will provide each country with funds sufficient to install hundreds of stations.  At this point, the countries are evaluating a wide range of technological options, with TAHMO stations in the mix.  With the expected roll-out of the second generation of TAHMO stations in January and the introduction of the final one-piece stations in June, we hope to be selected in at least some of these countries.  TAHMO has been invited to carry out a half-day training on the installation, maintenance, and use of TAHMO stations and data systems in Uganda in March 2015.  This will be especially important for the installations to take place in Sierra Leone and Benin, where travel is currently complicated due to ebola.