Rainwatch

Pete Lamb (CIMMS), Aondover Tarhule (Geog), and former graduate student Zakari Saley Bana (SoM) has developed a computer application that integrates several pieces of software to manage, process and visualize rainfall data. Known as Rain-watch, the system makes use of Excel spreadsheets, Access database and ArcGIS to generate visual representations of daily rainfall data in a manner that can be easily interpreted and understood by interested parties, including farmers. From previous studies the researchers concluded that farmers in Africa understand rainfall data by comparing it with past indicator years of good and poor rainfall. Utilizing this concept, Rainwatch generates percentiles representing the evolving season’s rainfall that are superimposed on seasonal percentile plots of a selected location or specified years. Users select the years or locations to be compared from interactive pull down menus. When tested at the ACMAD (African Center for Meteorological Applications for Devel-opment) in Niamey, Niger, new users with little familiarity with computers could com-fortably navigate their way through the system within 10 minutes. Since 2010, Rain-watch has been used at ACMAD and by Direction de la Météorologie Nationale du Ni-ger (DMNN) Niger for monitoring rainfall. With further improvements currently under-way, the researchers believe Rainwatch could become Africa’s version of Australia’s Rainman.