Big-weather data can improve healthcare

If you are environmentally conscious or interested in climate change, the implications of global warming must feature in your reading. In Africa, for a very long time, weather phenomenon was a concern only for farmers. Emerging weather vagaries and its trickledown impact on our everyday lives now means all of us must be alert to climate change.

For health workers, the link between weather and climate vagaries is already easily established. However, there is need for richer and larger scale data to allow for both prospective and retrospective analysis onto weather related healthcare costs hyperinflation.

In this regard, one remarkable project in Sub-Saharan Africa is the Trans African Hydro Meteorological stations or TAHMO: a mind boggling 20,000 weather stations or to put it into perspective, one station every 10 kilometers. TAHMO’s ambitious plan is to improve the quality and accuracy of weather data on the continent.

Unreliability of Kenyan weather forecasting is partly due to paucity of weather stations and inaccurate data therefore. To put this into perspective, do you know where your region’s nearest weather station is? Vast parts of the country lack weather data collection. This setup wrongly puts weather forecasting as a government role. In an ideal setup, this could be crowdsourced from both private and public sectors.

The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), estimates 4,857 satellites are in orbit, some of which provide weather data. The difference is in their accuracy and local weather prediction given the distance. By combining satellite data and on-the-ground weather station readings, the accuracy improves, giving reliable data up to township levels for predictive as opposed to reactive weather based activity planning.

As an agriculture reliant economy, reliable weather pattern prediction is important to avoid wastage, but also aid in proper planning: there is no need to plant if rains will be late or low.

TAHMO’s project is amazing both on the madness of its scale as well as the roll out model using schools to also get students interested in climate and environmental monitoring. What remains is to figure out how to feed back into classrooms and ordinary citizens to maintain the momentum of engagement in climate change discussions.

The second good model is the undertaking that all data gained from the project is shared free online as “open access”. Quite remarkable in this era of “data commoditisation”. This will ensure ease of participation as well as sustain the philanthropic spirit momentum necessary to reach the 20,000 crowdfunded weather stations.

Hopefully TAHMO’’s data can also be shared with public health medics and health economists to plan interventions in an anticipatory as opposed to our reactive approach. Other sectors also like logistics, infrastructure and construction could gain as well.