Agri and Weather toolbox

One of the target stakeholder groups of Rain for Africa are the African National Weather Services. By providing them with access to improved weather data for Africa, the weather information given to commercial and small-scale farmers will become more reliable.

The Agri and Weather Toolbox contains of a set of tools that allow weather services to:

• access weather data for research purposes
• add local data to the R4A platform
• increase their visibility.

The main applications and tools of the Agri and Weather Toolbox are:

• RainMap: application combining rainfall information from different sources (radar, satellite, stations) into a ‘best available’ gridded rainfall map. The cumulative precipitation and precipitation intensity can be viewed in for any location or period.
• Weather Forecast: application providing the weather forecast represented as an interactive geographical map. By clicking on a specific location on the map, the forecast for that location is presented in a graph.
• Weather Stations: application providing direct access to actual and historical time series from weather stations connected to the R4A platform.
• Data Access Kit: tools to automatically connect to the databases connected to the R4A platform via an API (application programming interface) or web service.
• Data Connection Kit: tools to enable national weather services to connect their raw weather data from stations, satellite, radars to the R4A platform and share their data easily with users.