TAHMO adds the Schools and Satellites (SaS) Project to its School2School Initiative

The TAHMO School2school (S2S) initiative aims at enhancing educational programs in TAHMO host schools. Installing TAHMO weather stations in schools gives teachers and students at all levels the unique opportunity to connect science curriculum with real weather data for both educational and research purposes. The initiative hopes to engage students and increase their interest in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education through activities such as taking of measurements/readings from the weather stations, creating graphs and interpreting data to identify trends, understanding weather predictions, comparing climates zones and weather patterns in different regions and countries, and understanding how the weather sensors work.

We are pleased to announce the Schools and Satellites (SaS) project as an additional activity under the school2school initiative to better quantify and understand precipitation patterns in Ghana. The goal of SaS project is to use machine learning to improve precipitation estimates from satellites; ground-based precipitation measurements from Smartphones4Water will be utilized in training and verification of the machine-learning algorithm developed. Classic 1.5-liter bottle rain gauges will be built and distributed to schools in Ghana, which will record local precipitation data using smartphones. You can learn more about this method of data collection here, and the accuracy of these gauges here. Partners involved include TU Delft, PULSAQUA, TAHMO, Smartphones4Water, CSIR-Savanna Agriculture Research Institute (SARI) and Ghana Meteorological Agency (GMet) and sponsored by the European Space Agency through IHE-Delft’s led Citizen Science Earth Observation Lab (CSEOL) project.

For more information, please take a look at the pitch presentation that was made to win the grant.

The project will take place in Tamale and its surroundings and kicked-off in September 2019. We already have 6 great volunteers taking measurements of the daily rainfall and testing together with us the citizen science data collection method with smartphones.

All collected data have open access and freely available through Smartphones4Water. If you want to be kept updated on the progress of this project, please subscribe to the monthly newsletter by sending an email to sandra@pulsaqua.com.