This is a description of Challenge No. 6 of the Kampala INSPIRE Hackathon 2020 led by Pavel Hájek, Jiří Valeš, Karel Jedlička, Samuel Ekwacu. For more information about mentors see the link.
This team aims to demonstrate several options for meteorological data exploitation for the needs of African farmers. The farmers’ needs were collected and are described in the Vaughan et al. (2017) study:
During previous INSPIRE Hackathons, we worked on an Agroclimatic map of a selected region, on a tool alerting farmers about forecasted severe weather conditions, or on a Climatic Services for Africa.
The team has developed a concept service returning:
- Growth plan – a time interval when to start planting to maximize yield
- Nitrogen plan – a time interval when to insert nitrogen fertilisation to maximize its effect
- Insect pests alert – alert when a risk of insect pest attack is high
(Source: https://www.plan4all.eu/2019/04/team-2-progress-report-i/)
This challenge for Kampala INSPIRE Hackathon is to search for trends in climatic data because future climatic conditions can be inspected and potentially forecasted based on temporal trends in climatic data.
Therefore we plan to provide a proof of concept scenario in which a user enters coordinates (i.e. choose a locality), he/she will get information about several climatic variables (e. g. Last spring / First fall frost date, Annual/Seasonal Evapotranspiration and precipitation, Soil temperature, Solar radiation, etc.) and their evolvement in time. The initial visualization can be depicted by Figure 1 below, where an Annual average temperature and the trend of such a variable is shown (this figure is taken from Stargate project). More-over we would like to incorporate information about the uncertainty of such a variable in the graph as well, in order to capture the credibility of the used data.
Fig. 1 An example of a temperature variable and the visualization of its trend in Rostěnice farm, CZE. References: EUXDAT project and Stargate project.