Digital innovation harnesses the power of real-time weather data
This story is adapted from a originally published Through the Accelerated CGIAR Climate Research Impact on Africa (AICCRA).
National Meteorological Services play a central role in their national efforts to predict and manage climate-related risks and develop effective resilience and adaptation policies.
Automatic weather stations, like this one in Togo, make vital measurements of rainfall, temperature, and other parameters in near real time. But national weather services need to be able to efficiently integrate large amounts of information into their databases to help decision makers.
Real-time monitoring of floods, droughts, and other climate hazards—along with the variety of climate and weather forecasts provided by national weather services—helps agencies make critical decisions about agriculture, public health, energy, transportation, and other fundamental components of society.
However, these operations require large amounts of reliable and timely climate and weather data. Historically, this has been lacking in many African countries.
Recent initiatives, supported by the United Nations Development Programme, the World Bank and other international partners, have been working to improve the availability and quality of climate data on the continent, notably through investments in networks of automatic weather stations. These sites require far less human involvement than traditional sites, which require staff visits to collect data—in some cases multiple times a day. The automated station can take measurements every 15 minutes and automatically transmit the data to the weather bureau. They can also be set up in places where it is more difficult to collect continuous weather data, such as remote rural communities.
This higher-resolution data creates a more robust historical climate dataset, which can ultimately improve a country’s climate predictions and forecasts.
Having these real-time data networks can play an important role in responding to and mitigating the climate emergency.
new data challenges
Rapid expansion of automated weather monitoring networks is addressing critical data gaps across Africa. But they also create a new problem, one that arises from a lack of coordination among the various initiatives, programs and donors who fund the building of these networks.
The result is that a given country may have multiple types of automation networks, each built by different companies, and each requiring different components and processes for maintenance and repair.
Also, these companies don’t format and store their AWS data in the same way — some use proprietary formats. So while automated stations do provide a lot of critical weather data to the National Weather Service (good), the different networks cannot “talk” to each other. If national weather services cannot effectively combine, synchronize, and analyze their data sets, vast amounts of data will be excluded from decision-making.
Scale Transformative Solutions
Scientist at Columbia Climate Institute International Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) sees this challenge and the frustration it creates among its many national weather service partners. In response, they developed the Automatic Weather Station Data Tool (ADT). And thanks to CGIAR Climate Research for its support to the Accelerated Impacts in Africa project (ACRA) and adapting agriculture to today’s climate for tomorrow’s (act today), technical training and workshops were held, and the use of new tools by African National Meteorological Services increased significantly.
AWS Data Tool is a free web-based application with an easy-to-use graphical interface that enables users of national weather services to access, process, perform quality control, and visualize data from different automated networks in one place. It can also monitor sites in real time to see which sites are working and which are offline, making it easier to understand where data is coming from and resolve transmission outages faster. ADT stems from broader climate services provided under Strengthening National Climate Services (formulate) initiative, which recognizes that the availability of high-quality climate data does not automatically translate into ease of access or effective use.
ADT web interface for Kenya, showing a network of seven different AWSs.
In less than a year, IRI trained dozens of staff in the national meteorological services of Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Senegal, and Zambia to use ADT to help synchronize their data streams. Mali’s meteorological service hopes to receive similar training in the near future.
In Kenya, the National Meteorological Service faced considerable challenges trying to manage a network of seven different automatic weather stations, a tool that greatly simplifies the analysis and viewing of weather data.
“ADT’s data visualization capabilities will greatly support our mission of providing high-quality and timely climate information to users. Its ability to aggregate disparate data types is a game-changer,” said Onesmus Ruirie, Chief Meteorologist, Kenya Meteorological Service.
“ADT’s data visualization capabilities will greatly support our mission of providing high-quality and timely climate information to users. Its ability to aggregate disparate data types is a game-changer.” — Onesmus Ruirie, Kenya Meteorological Service
The ability to aggregate data at hourly, daily, 10-day and monthly intervals excites many meteorologists, especially when coupled with the ability to display and download maps, charts and tables of this data for reporting or consultation by decision makers hour.
IRI is a key partner in the AICCRA project, whose theory of change states that if national meteorological agencies can effectively aggregate, analyze and visualize climate data using state-of-the-art practices and tools, then relevant national agencies and stakeholders can better to better monitor, prepare for, and respond to climate-driven disasters more timely and effectively. These same stakeholders can also inform long-term national strategies for climate change adaptation through stronger evidence.
Regional climate centers such as IGAD’s Climate Prediction and Applications Center (ICPAC) in East Africa also recognize the role ADT can play in helping improve the development of weather services climate service. ICPAC is keen to raise awareness of this tool and build capacity for its use in the region. In addition to Ethiopia and Kenya, IGAD members include Djibouti, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan and Uganda.
“[ADT’s] “Its ability to process data from automatic weather stations, its visualization capabilities and its ability to provide a unified database for different networks make it a powerful tool for managing East African data,” said Herbert Misiani, data management specialist at ICPAC.
ICPAC, another key AICCRA partner, also helped the project expand to other areas Critical and needed IRI innovations in climate services Support the agricultural sector.
