Latest news

Agro-Weather services in Ethiopia in public-private partnership

Climate change is impacting on global food production. The risks of crop failure due to climate change-induced weather variability are highest in small-scale agriculture, which is often rain-fed. On the positive side, mobile phones and other new communication technologies offer great opportunities to digitalize agricultural services, especially in remote places. Weather and climate information services are also improving thanks to the widespread availability of satellite data, while web-interfaces, APIs and other IT technology enable easy dissemination of this information. Read more ›

Climate related risks

Climate is the largest contributor to agricultural yield variability in Africa, making climate change a topic of high importance. For many years, knowledge about the weather for agricultural practices is passed from generation to generation, however this knowledge cannot be applied anymore due to a changing climate.
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Crowd-sourced rainfall observations in Burundi

Last week, Aliane Nahimana successfully defended her MSc thesis about crowd-sourced rainfall observations in Burundi and the quality of Weather Impact’s weather forecast. For this work, she was supervised by TU Delft, Weather Impact and AUXFIN, and performed her work both in The Netherlands and Burundi. In her research, Aliane investigated the quality of crowd-sourced rainfall observations and its value for validation studies. Read more ›

Weather Impact continues weather SMS in Kenya during short rains

The short rains in Kenya are starting. Weather Impact starts this week the seasonal SMS weather forecast to Kenyan farmers. This service is a continuation of the CropMon services.

Around 130.000 farmers that were registered during the CropMon project will receive a weekly weather forecast. The forecast contains information about the temperature and rainfall in the upcoming week. Read more ›

Public private engagement for agro-meteo service delivery in Ethiopia

For the fifth year in a row, the National Meteorological Agency of Ethiopia and Weather Impact are collaborating to provide localized weather forecasts to almost 10,000 farmers in Ethiopia via their mobile phones. This public-private partnership for agro-meteorological services is sustained by Benefit-Sesame Business Network. Read more ›

Cereal Growers Association and Weather Impact continue cooperation

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 ›

Agri-Insight Service bundle

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 ›

Burundi: After the weather forecast… the seasonal forecast

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 ›

FAW alert makes a difference for Ghanaian farmers

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 ›

Quality of our forecasts – how we add value

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 ›