All posts in Uncategorized

TAHMO has received funding for a two-year project to set up a water and weather monitoring system in Ghana’s cocoa region. The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) awarded a TAHMO consortium of three partners a grant under its Food & Business Applied Research Fund. The consortium consists of Farmerline, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (Kumasi, Ghana), and Delft University of Technology (Delft, Netherlands).

Farmerline, a private company based in Ghana, provides improved information access and better communication channels for small-scale farmers through a mobile messaging platform. Together with the two academic consortium partners, they will develop both a dense network of TAHMO weather stations and the technical infrastructure to enable farmers’ access to the TAHMO weather data via mobile phones.

Weather-related information is the single most valuable type of information that farmers do not have ready access to. This project aims to leverage TAHMO’s self-supporting climate observation system, based on low-cost, high-precision weather sensors, sending information to a web-based data server using cellphone technology. These innovative weather stations will measure meteorological and water resource variables, which will subsequently be communicated to farmers via Farmerline’s mobile information services.

The consortium plans to develop a business model to rapidly make the project self-sustainable, transforming the initiative into a means to reduce poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. The belief that agriculture offers Ghana the best opportunity to turn a vicious cycle of poverty into a virtuous cycle of development will be the basis for this project and future collaborations.

After the success of last year’s Sensor Design Competition in Nairobi, Kenya, TAHMO organized another edition of the event this year for the ECOWAS region.

The 2014 design competition culminated in a workshop week hosted by the Federal University of Technology Akure (FUTA) in Nigeria. Scholars, students, and engineers were asked to send in an innovative design idea for an inexpensive and robust sensor that measures a weather or hydrological variable. The teams with the best designs were subsequently invited to attend the workshop week in Akure from August 4-8.

Ten teams with participants from four different universities were invited to attend the workshop week in Akure, Nigeria, where they further developed and improved their designs. Among the designs were sensors for measuring rainfall, humidity, sunlight, wind direction and speed, and temperature. The ultimate goal was to publish measurements online at the end of the workshop week via an Arduino micro-computer on the @TAHMO_Arduino Twitter feed. At the end of the week, all sensors were connected so that the first tests and measurements could be done.

In addition to the preliminary tests with the newly-built sensors, the TAHMO team also installed a regular weather station at FUTA, the first TAHMO station in Nigeria! Together with FUTA’s Dr. Ahmed Balogun – our gracious host -, TAHMO is now looking into opportunities for funding and collaboration to expand the TAHMO network in Nigeria.

Last summer, Nick van de Giesen, Rolf Hut, and John Selker submitted a position paper about TAHMO and its goals to Wiley. With this publication, they hope to shed more light on the importance of TAHMO’s activities. The entire paper can be found here.

Six enthusiastic middle school students at East Junior High in Boise, Idaho, kicked off the TAHMO School-2-School Program at the end of 2013 by forming their very own weather club. Their group, the International Climate Team – East Jr. High, will serve as the first U.S. school in TAHMO’s sister school partnership program. The TAHMO School-2-School (S2S) initiative aims to foster international school partnerships and science education, utilizing on-site automatic climate monitoring technology to collect weather data and allow schools to compare their local environments with partner schools around the world. At East Junior High, students have begun by exploring, testing, wiring, and programming tipping buckets, air temperature sensors, and solar radiation sensors.

Read more

Last April, TAHMO was invited to join the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) expo in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. This expo featured the latest in climate monitoring technologies, and coincided with the UNDP’s “Multi-Country Support Program to Strengthen Climate Information Systems in Africa”. In its essence a climate change adaptation conference, the event helped connect delegates from African countries with companies that sell climate monitoring technology. TAHMO displayed a 3D printed model of the newest Decagon weather station currently in development, and visitors were impressed by its small size and possibilities. The expo proved to be a very fruitful networking event for TAHMO and resulted in a number of connections that may lead to future collaborations.

TAHMO’s new sister schools program helps connect African schools with North American/European schools and will allow students and teachers to monitor and compare their local weather and climates. The first American sister schools station was recently installed in Boise, Idaho, and will be paired with its sister school station in Koyoo, Kenya.

The published story is available here:

Boise students set up a weather station at school, to help kids in Africa

by Rick Lantz
KTVB.COM
Posted on April 24, 2014, at 6:25 PM

BOISE — We often have students visit the KTVB studio and ask our meteorologists how they track the weather. It is one of the most fun and interesting parts of the job. We understand that students at East Junior High School in Boise are taking learning about weather to another level.
Not only are the students actively participating by building their own weather station, but this program will also help with hunger.
It is part of a dream that was envisioned at the beginning of the school year and is finally coming true.
“I am pretty excited,” said student Bing Ho.
“I like math and science so this is very interesting to me,” said student Danielle Moro.
“Actually seeing how the weather was at different times, that’s pretty cool,” said student Megan Byres.
We are talking about a professional weather station capable of recording real-time weather. The students are putting the station together on the school’s roof and connected this station to a computer to record all of the information.
Pam Aishlin is a geologist volunteering on the project, with help from the Geoscience program at Boise State University. She’s teaming up on the international project with a group called TAHMO, a non-profit organization that is putting in weather stations across Africa.
“To help with climate modeling for the region, as well as to help local farmers. The area very much needs more weather data,” said Aishlin.
Better weather observations for areas of Africa means better farming to feed the African people. She chose East Junior High and is teaming the school up with a sister school in Africa known as Coyu.
“The sister schools, going forward, will do fundraising to support,” said Aishlin. “for example, East will do fundraising to support Coyu. right now Coyu has its weather station, but they need a fence around the weather station, so East will fundraise to get that provided for their sister school.”
This is only the beginning.
“East Junior High is the first experimental school in the U.S./European side of the equation,” said Aishlin. “They aim to put in thousands of weather stations across Africa, many of them being at schools because it also provides the educational component for the children.”
Boise’s River Glen Junior High School will be the next school. They’ll set up a weather station and also be a sister school to Africa. So far, how are the children doing in this volunteer effort?
“They are excited. For students to show up two days a week after school, on their own time, volunteering their time, to learn how to build a station, how to program it, they’re very excited,” said Aishlin. “They’re even more excited about the African sister-school component. They’re excited about having connections globally.”
School Principal David Geene agrees.
“I think the key component is it brings East Junior High and this local community on the weather track to the rest of the world and it connects them to that weather pattern worldwide,” said Greene.
East Junior High deserves a big pat on the back for being the first to build an educational weather station to provide local weather and to team up with a school in Africa for such a worthy cause. It is a very good dream.

Photo credit: Adam Worthington/KTVB