Photo ILRI/David Ngome
New server at the Kenya Meteorological Department strengthens climate services for farmers
To enhance the data processing and analysis capabilities of the Kenya Meteorological Department, the department has been provided with a new computer server through its partnership with AICCRA.
The transfer is part of AICCRA's commitment to its partnership with the Kenya Meteorological Department (KMD), the Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization (KALRO), and other organisations in the country who work to provide forecasts and agro-advisories that help farmers adapt to a changing climate.
On receiving the equipment, KMD’s assistant director for climate services, Dr Kennedy Thiongo said the servers will have a significant positive impact the KMD’s capacity to process and store data for weather data and climate information services.
AICCRA supports KMD to strengthen the KMD’s Climate Data Management Systems (CDMS).
Using the CDMS system, KMD runs a weather data portal that offers access to usable forecasts, from which advisories can be developed.
The new servers will become a part of a system running powerful tools for weather data analyses, such as Automated Weather Stations (AWS), Advanced Data Transfer (ADT), eventually producing data through the Maproom visualization tools.
“For us to crunch data of the scale that we have at KMD, we need good hardware, and this is exactly what (AICCRA) has done; they have filled our data processing gap.”
Onesmus Ruirie, Assistant Director, Data Management Services, KMD
The new data processing capacity will especially contribute to an AICCRA led partnership initiative between KMD and KALRO to revamp the Kenya Agricultural Observatory Platform (KAOP).
Through KAOP, climate and agronomic data are combined to generate tailored agriculture and climate advisories for farmers in digital format which improve their livelihoods by mitigating climate risks.
Dr Kennedy Thiong'o (centre) received the server from AICCRA team at the Kenya Meteorological Department offices in Nairobi. Photo ILRI/David Ngome
According to Dr. Todd Crane, AICCRA's team leader in Kenya, strengthening KMD’s data processing capacity make its contributions to KAOP more effective and timely.
“A lot of efforts are going toward having the climate data processed to generate very specific advisories – specific to certain crops, specific agro-ecology – scaled down to sub-county and ward levels to build farmers’ climate resilience.”
Dr. Todd Crane
AICCRA is working across several African countries to strengthen partnerships between public institutions and the private sector to promote the sharing of data and expertise so that climate information services reach 'last-mile' users like Kenya's farmers.
Author
David Ngome, Communication Leader, AICCRA Kenya