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Every five kilometers ($ 3) that you run and every thirty kilometers ($ 5) that you ride on your bicycle are valuable. 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, a supplier of measurement technology, donates these dollars for your meters to the Trans-African Hydro-Meteorological Observatory Foundation (TAHMO).

That way, both you and the Meter Group support TAHMO in its aim to achieve a network of a total of 20,000 weather stations in Africa. Local farmers and fishermen will benefit most from the local real-time weather information and weather forecasts, that will become available through each weather station. This information is crucial because over 75 percent of the local population is dependent on agriculture and hence the weather. Professors Nick van de Giesen (Civil Engineering and Geosciences at TU Delft) and John Selker (Biological and Ecological Engineering, Oregon State University) designed the TAHMO low-maintenance weather stations with their research teams and partners. The weather stations are mostly located at schools so they can also be used in educational programs. Without these weather stations, there is no accurate weather information available in most places.

Download the free app and bring accurate weather in Africa closer with each step https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/every-meter-counts/id1185112162?mt=8

For more information about TAHMO click here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udKAu0Fr9hI

TAHMO is attending various events, conferences, and seminars. Do you want to know when/where to find us? Please see the list below.

• AGU Fall meeting, December 14-18 – San Fransisco
  https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm15/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/76482
• GRP Kick-off meetings, January 20-22 – Kampala
  http://www.globalresiliencepartnership.org/teams/meteorological-early-warning/
• School2School Teacher training in collaboration with GLOBE, January 25-27 – Nairobi
  http://www.globe.gov/

Oluwatobi Oyinlola at the Hackaday finals

The past Summer, TAHMO ran a project under the umbrella of Hackaday. The project helped us to move forward on the lightning sensors and the more advanced usage of GPS signals. We made it to the semi-finals but unfortunately, we did not make it to the finals. However, team-member Oluwatobi Oyinlola was able to travel to San Francisco to attend the finals. He writes: “It was a great privilege to represent TAHMO at the Hackaday Conference in San Francisco in November 2015. I met many like-minded people in the field of embedded systems, such as Chris Low, David Pruth, and some other electronics hobbyists. I really appreciate the support of TAHMO for my participation. Unfortunately, we did not make it to the finals but it was a very worthwhile experience.”

Hacking is still very much at the heart of TAHMO and we hope we will be able to run another competition on the African continent in the coming year.

For the TAHMO project funded by the first Call of the Food & Business Applied Research Fund (ARF) of NWO-WOTRO, Mr. Alloysius Attah and Ms. Ellen van Andel participated in a three-day-workshop on Food and Business Research in Uganda which took place from October 1 to 3.
At the workshop, several issues were discussed such as co-creation, stakeholder engagement, and commercialization of knowledge. About 40 project representatives and 25 external stakeholders actively engaged by exchanging ideas and sharing lessons learned to enhance the uptake of research results derived from the projects.

More information:  three-day-workshop and TAHMO project in Ghana

Nick van de Giesen opens DGI

Concrete solutions to problems in the developing world using science and technology – that’s the goal of TU Delft’s Global Initiative (DGI), which was officially launched on 24th November 2015. Nick van de Giesen, co-founder of TAHMO and chairman of the DGI had the honor to kick off the event.
The launch featured TU Delft scientists, students, and entrepreneurs strolling down a catwalk, showcasing 22 projects already tackling global challenges e.g. a smartphone app that scans a missing limb, then guides the creation of a 3D-printed prosthetic; diapers for disabled children; solar powered water purification; a cheap, robust thermometer; gas stoves tailored to different global contexts. TAHMO also presented its innovative and robust weather station for sub-Saharan Africa.

Then four international keynote speakers – Noha El-Ghobashy, founding president of Engineering 4 Change; Professor Mugendi K. M’Rithaa, industrial designer at South Africa’s Cape Peninsula University of Technology; IBM’s Dr. Kala Fleming, a thought leader on water management; and Professor Lex Peters, founder of the Female Cancer Foundation – provided further inspiration, with a touch of practical advice, in their extraordinary ‘stories from the field.’ And to finish, the University’s Rector Magnificus, Professor Karel Luyben, was presented with the first copy of DGI’s new booklet:  “Science for the Benefit of People. All people. Worldwide.”

More information can be found here: www.delftglobal.tudelft.nl

by Nick van de Giesen

The European Geosciences Union (EGU) has an educational outreach program for high school teachers, called Geosciences Information For Teachers (GIFT). Every year, workshops are organized during which teachers interact with geoscientists. As is stated on their website: “The main objective of the GIFT workshops is to spread first-hand scientific information to science teachers of primary and secondary schools, significantly shortening the time between discovery and textbook, and to provide the teachers with material that can be directly transported to the classroom.” Usually, these workshops are held at the General Assembly of the EGU in Vienna but this year there was a special workshop near Addis Ababa with 35 teachers from Ethiopia. During the 2012 EGU General Assembly, I presented TAHMO to European teachers at the GIFT workshop. This year, I did the same in Addis but now included the “build your own disdrometer” experiment. The teachers were very interested and there was a lively discussion on how we could bring further development in the classroom. Especially the question as to what extent local materials can be used for building weather stations was discussed intensely.

Teachers soldering disdrometers

The disdrometer exercise was, as always, a big success. Basically, a piezo-electric element is glued under a hard surface, in our case the glass of a little picture frame. Then the two wires from a standard mono-audio plug are soldered to the metal and ceramic parts of the piezo. The plug can then be plugged into a little amplifier with a speaker after which the sensor can be tested by ticking on it. People were very eager and did not need any help with soldering, even though no one had soldered before! In a very short time, ten distros were put together and tested. Several teachers expressed interest in repeating the exercise at their schools. It should be very simple to put together a small package with which one can perform the experiment. Most items can normally be sourced locally, such as soldering iron and tin, super glue, a hard protective surface, and an audio plug. A cheap radio can be hacked to make the signal audible. All that is really needed are some instructions and piezoelectric elements.

TAHMO has won the Global Resilience Challenge to develop a meteorological early warning system in Uganda for acute climate-induced shocks. Over the next two years, we will implement an early warning system in Uganda to give critical warnings to fishermen on Lake Victoria, where 5,000 people drown annually due to severe weather.

Climate change is impacting the frequency and severity of severe weather events with residual effects on the lives and livelihoods of people in developing countries who lack the capabilities and infrastructure to cope with these climate-induced hazards. National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHS) in the Horn of Africa region struggle to provide sufficient early warning and timely, accurate weather information in advance of disasters. Impactful adaptation measures to enhance resilience to these acute shocks must be undertaken.

Early Warning Systems (EWS) are a critical tool for saving lives and reducing economic losses from floods, droughts, storms, and other weather-related hazards. Five and ten-day forecasts have been shown to increase farmers’ resilience and increase incomes in the face of drought conditions. The implementation of EWSs generates benefit-to-cost ratios between 4:1 and 36:1 in developing countries but are often non-functional because of a lack of weather data, partitioned efforts by different agencies, and unsustainable long-term funding. TAHMO proposes to address the impacts of weather-related hazards on target populations in Uganda by establishing an early warning system (EWS) that is:

A complete end-to-end solution: Weather information will flow from our network of stations all the way down to millions of vulnerable fishermen and smallholder farmers in Uganda.

Scalable: Immediately after the launch, all 16 million+ mobile phone owners in Uganda will have on-demand access to weather information and all 8 million Airtel subscribers will have free access. As importantly, the partnership model we have with Airtel in Uganda is replicable in every other African country.

Sustainable: Our solution will continue to operate, independently of donor funding, for the foreseeable future.

Impactful: The partners in our consortium have a proven track record of delivering services that have measurable financial and social impact.
TAHMO develops the system together with Earth Networks, African Centres for Lightning and Electromagnetics (ACLE), Climate Change Adaptation Innovation (CHAI), and Human Networks International (HNI).

The Global Resilience Partnership is convened by The Rockefeller Foundation, USAID, and Sida.