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Improved Weather Data Collection & Transmission

Submitted by Serign Jobe on December 2, 2011 - 08:30
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The Gambia
The National Meteorology department of the Gambia operates a network of 10 weather monitoring stations across the nation. All the stations are provided with mobile phones in order to communicate their data to a central point located at Banjul International Airport. The rate of transmission is far from satisfactory as staff in the field would complain about their calls being rejected/ignored and those located at the collection point complaining that those in the field are failing to communicate their data. One possible solution is to use SMS technology to submit the data to a central database that is accessible to the users at the central location.
Recommended Solutions: 
Weather Collector
User Stories: 

 

  • Data collector at location types in weather data and sends to a specified SMS number
     
  • Data collector receives an automated confirmation SMS message saying the data was received
     
  • Central location user logs in and sees all the weather data submissions for the day/month/etc
Constraints: 

 

  • Only the the collection point at the Airport and Banjul have access to computers and the internet
     
  • Data is transmitted from each location every 3 hours.
     
  • Sample data looks like: 61711 42960 30902 10350 20258 40119 80002 333 20231 58012 60121 70224 82073 82613 84436=
     
  • The data is currently stored on paper after it is received and later typed up for transmission to external partners
Extra Credit: 
  • Ability to export the data into multiple formats, including the format that is sent to the external partner
     
  • Ability to specify a white-list of accepted cell-phone numbers that the data will be accepted from
Next Steps and Sustainability: 

Our subject matter experts submitted this problem and plan to use it in their operations if it is successfully created.  

Qualitative Impact: 
From small decisions like "Wool v.s cotton shirt today?" to substantially bigger ones like "When and how should I plan my farming this rainy season" are all impacted by more accurate weather data collection.
Quantitative Impact: 
Anyone who depends on accurate weather reporting in the Gambia... I'd say the whole country :-).
Problem Definition Category: 
Agriculture
Disaster Resiliency
Environment
Water
Event: 
RHoK Global December 2011

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