A school in Sri Lanka’s Jaffna state is using mobile weather stations developed by IWMI, which students built by themselves, with support from teachers. The stations provide 10-day weather forecasts, enabling people to prepare for rain, drought, or high winds.
This long-term project began in 2014, and in the following years the students made hardware improvements, including better sensors and boards. Weather data is uploaded to a website, where it is available in both tabular and graphical formats to help users understand changing weather patterns.
In February 2016, a weather station predicted a 60% chance of rainfall, despite it being outside the typical rainy season. Because the community could read this forecast, they were able to protect their paddy harvest. Following this success, the local community shifted from keeping the weather data inside the school to displaying it on a public board outside the school to provide daily meteorological updates to everyone.
