African Weather Balloon Project uses blockchain to track climate in West Africa – Interview

According to the results of a study, almost 91% of deaths from natural disasters recorded between 1970 and 2019 occurred in developing countries. This study adds that such a high number of deaths is mainly due to the lack of early warning systems and disaster management protocols.

Using blockchain to store climate data

It has been shown that technological improvements can help reduce the death toll from floods or hurricanes. Unfortunately for third world countries, poor access to centralized data used to predict weather patterns means that the number of lives lost to natural disasters remains unacceptably high.

It is this sad state of affairs that led the backers of the Kanda Weather Balloon project and the creators of the Telos protocol to seek an unusual solution to the problem - the use of blockchain. This project is reportedly already empowering African university students to leverage the Telos blockchain to provide a viable solution to the lack of real-time and historical climate data in West Africa by building a fully collaborative balloon network.

Telos uptime and minimal storage costs

Supporters of the Kanda weather balloon Project believe that collecting data in this way will enable communities to prepare for and recover from severe weather. To learn more about this balloon project and how blockchain makes this type of data collection cost-effective, Bitcoin.com News reached out to Nicolas Lopez. Lopez is a former software engineer at Boeing and the current chief engineer at Kanda.

Below are Lopez's answers to questions emailed to him.

Bitcoin.com News (BCN): Can you briefly tell us why weather tracking is important?

Nicolas Lopez (NL):The upper air observations with in-situ sensors are important because there is currently very little data in this regard. Weather satellites are very good at measuring values ​​near the ground, but poorly in the middle of the atmosphere. Most weather models require data from up to 35,000 feet away to make good predictions about precipitation and even climate.

For example, we have seen cases where a single weather balloon launched from Douala, Cameroon changed the original model state by more than 5 degrees Celsius 160 kilometers away over southeastern Nigeria. Without this data, the models rely on incorrect data assumptions and perform very poorly, particularly in West Africa. We speak to weather company Climacell.org to show how just a few starting stations can greatly impact the accuracy of rainfall forecasts.

BCN: How does it work and why Telos?

EN:We use the Telos blockchain to store the data we collect in our launches. Most weather data is already difficult to obtain due to NOAA funding limitations and the use of outdated data storage. We use blockchain because it has 100% uptime and low storage costs for small amounts of data. In addition, Telos smart contract allows us to send real-time rewards for “mining” digital currencies to the balloon launcher.

We call it “mining” because atmospheric pressure always decreases with altitude and is difficult to forge by someone on the ground… similar to how Bitcoin hashes cannot be forged. When the sensor measures lower pressure values, it knows that the balloon has been launched and sends Telos currency accordingly.

BCN: Do you have any plans to expand this to other parts of the continent?

EN:Telos has active communities in Kenya, Zimbabwe and Nigeria and they are growing. Telos was recently listed on Kucoin, which is widely used in Nigeria as an exit for Telos to local currencies. Currently Kanda works with university students in Nigeria, Ghana and Cameroon, but we want to expand to other parts of Africa such as Kenya due to the high rainfall near Lake Victoria. We think we could create a lot of value there too.

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