WACREN is developing a new community of innovators, practitioners and enthusiasts who will leverage the power of the Internet of Things (IoT) to serve the WACREN community.
At a three-day Workshop organised in collaboration with the Abdul Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), over 30 participants drawn from different National RENs and meteorology and climate organisations, imbibed knowledge of the basics of IoT and how it can be leveraged to tackle real-life weather and climate issues.
For WACREN, the Workshop formed part of a broader plan to deploy new weather and climate services to its community through NRENs. It was the first step towards boosting the deployment of sensor networks and LoraWAN gateways for WACREN NRENs for climate and weather research support services.
The participants drawn from selected climate research institutions like WASCAL, ACMAD, Ghana Meteorological Services and climate and meteorological researchers from institutions under WACREN NRENs, participated in the intensive hands-on training.
The facilitators from ICTP took participants on a deep dive into the rudiments and potentials of IoT and showed them how to install weather stations and read data using different tools and software.
“The workshop provided a comprehensive overview of IoT technologies, as well as practical experience with installing and configuring sensors, gateways, and data analysis tools,” Prof. Kehinde Ogunjobi of WASCAL mentioned this when giving a report on the workshop to the WACREN 2023 Conference.
WACREN has broad plans to scale up the initiative to cover more meteorological agencies in the region, cover more variables in order to provide more climate data and densification of climate sensors for the region.
Combating climate change
Through this initiative, WACREN hopes to support the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 13 – ‘Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts’. Sensor networks and LoRaWAN can help combat climate change by providing valuable data and insights that can help reduce carbon emissions, improve resource management, and promote sustainability.
