Farmer’s First Africa: Providing Precipitation Forecasts for the Central African Republic

Precipitation forecasts are of vital importance to farmers, particularly in regions without the infrastructure to monitor changing weather in real-time. With an accurate precipitation forecast, farmers can make better informed decisions regarding irrigation practices, potentially saving a long journey from the village to the field and the labor of watering crops. Delivering an accurate forecast to those who can directly use the information is a two-factor problem – the first being producing accurate forecasts in areas where there are few observations to verify numerical atmospheric models, and the second being the delivery of forecasts themselves. Farmer’s First Africa has been addressing these two issues by delivering state-of-the-science precipitation forecasts to farmers in the Central African Republic for the past three years. Forecasts are produced by meteorologists at Athenium Analytics and disseminated through automated e-mails to staff in the Central African Republic, where they are relayed to farmers via shortwave radio. Farmer’s First Africa has also built a network of 39 precipitation stations in several local villages to provide data to improve local forecasts, where farmers send precipitation observations directly to Farmer’s First Africa staff via text messages. Use of rugged plastic rain gauges to collect observations and short-wave radio broadcasts to disseminate forecasts provides a user-designed approach to build a sustainable feedback loop for forecast improvement that is driven from the bottom-up. This presentation will discuss how Athenium Analytics meteorologists produce categorical probabilistic precipitation forecasts from global ensembles and optimize them using the locally collected daily precipitation data as well as the dissemination process through the Farmer’s First Africa organization.