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15 July 2020. Cereal Growers Association (CGA) and Weather Impact (WI) sign an agreement to continue Weather information delivery to the members of CGA. CGA is a non-profit, national farmer association registered in Kenya. The organisation mobilizes cereal and pulse smallholder farmers and supports them in their production and marketing. Read more ›
Weather Impact and Satelligence combined their strengths in agri-meteorology and satellite remote sensing and created the Agri-Insight Service Bundle. The bundle provides:
– Daily agri-weather forecast
– Daily Fall Army Worm (FAW) alert, to receive timely risk warnings for FAW resulting in effective precautionary measures
– Weekly crop growth indicator, to keep track of crop growth resulting in early indication of over-/under-production. Read more ›
Last month, our colleague Aliane Nahimana and partners from the GAP4All project (Good Agricultural Practices for All) visited farmers in Burundi.
The main objective of the visit was evaluating the new version of the seasonal forecast. After the successful weather forecast service, this seasonal forecast has been built as an answer to farmers who desire to make seasonal decisions for their farming activities. Read more ›
Weather Impact has run – together with Esoko and Satelligence – a successful pilot in Ghana last year. The early warning system for the Fall Armyworm reached 1260 farmers per voice sms, and is available in 15 languages. This way they received weekly information about the risk of this insect and have the possibility to prevent crop damage in time. A great way to increase food security of many farmers.
Up to 99 % of the users indicated the alert as easy and useful, please watch our video in which farmers tell about the high impact on their yield. Read more ›
Weather works differently near the equator. African rainstorms are very erratic, develop fast and on a small scale. It is therefore important to use models and algorithms that can predict these weather patterns. Weather Impacts’ high-quality forecasts are based on three sources of data: (1) the ensemble prediction system of the European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF), which is considered the best global weather model, (2) local weather stations, (3) high quality satellite observations. Read more ›
Kenya experiences a bimodal rainy season, with long rains occurring in the period March-June, and short rains in October-December. The short rains of 2019 started already early September and have not completely seized yet. This resulted very high total precipitation amounts, flooding and mudslides in East Africa.
Weather Impact welcomes Pleun Bonekamp as our new specialist in meteorology and climate change. Pleun has a master degree in meteorology, physical oceanography and climate and is currently finishing her PhD in mountain meteorology and climate change at Utrecht University. She has experience with different (atmospheric) models and big data.
We are very happy Pleun is joining our team, and we are looking forward to work together in various projects where she will be involved. Read more ›
Founded in 2014 by Gerrit Hiemstra and Arnold Lobbrecht, Weather Impact has grown into a company that creates local impact by providing reliable weather information and agricultural advisory to small-scale farmers in developing countries.
Over the past 5 years;
• we have served over 153.000 farmers with our weather forecasts
• we have delivered our services in 10 countries in Africa, Asia and Europe
• we participated in more than 30 projects
• we shared our knowledge in numerous workshops, presentations and conferences
Weather Impact presented how weather information can support farmers in their daily business at the “Geodata innovation in Myanmar Agriculture” event. In Myanmar, Weather Impact has developed a real-time agrometeorological advisory service for farmers and extension officers. Our forecasts are combined with agronomic knowledge on cropping cycles and farm activities, and in this way a real-time, weather-based advisory can be provided, unique for the location and crop of the farmer. For example:
Seasonal forecasts are issued by various centres worldwide, including the ECMWF. Weather Impact is experienced in bringing this state-of-the-art weather and climate knowledge to smallholder farmers. Currently we are working on operational services on the seasonal time scale. Because of these developments, our colleague Bob Ammerlaan visited the ECMWF annual seminar last month in Reading (UK) to learn more about the current status of seasonal forecasting and to share our expertise. The annual seminar’s theme was “Subseasonal to seasonal forecasting: recent progress and future prospects”. Read more ›
