African Weather Balloon Project uses blockchain to pursue the climate in West Africa - interview

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

Use of blockchain for saving climate data

It has been shown that technological improvements can help reduce the number of fatalities through floods or vertebral storms. Unfortunately, poor access to centralized data used to predict weather patterns means that the number of human lives lost due to natural disasters remains unacceptable.

It is this sad state that caused the backers of the Kanda Weather Ballon project and the creators of the Telos protocol to look for an unusual solution to the problem-using the blockchain. According to reports, this project has already enabled African university students to use the Telos-Blockchain in order to offer a practical solution for the lack of real-time and historical climate data in West Africa by building a fully community ballnet network.

telos operating time and minimum storage costs

supporter of the kanda weather balloon project believe that collecting data in this way will enable municipalities to prepare for storms and to recover from it. In order to learn more about this balloon project and how the blockchain makes this type of data recording cost -effective, Bitcoin.com news turned to Nicolas Lopez. Lopez is a former software engineer at Boeing and the current chief engineer of Kanda.

Below you will find Lopez's answers to questions that were sent to him by email.

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

Nicolas Lopez (NL): The upper air observations with in-situ sensors are important, since there are currently very few data in this regard. Weather satellites can measure values ​​near the ground very well, but bad in the middle of the atmosphere. Most weather models need data from a distance of up to 35,000 feet to make good predictions about precipitation and even the climate.

For example, we have seen cases in which a single weather balloon from Douala, Cameroon, was launched, changed the original model by more than 5 degrees Celsius 160 kilometers away over Southeastnigeria. Without this data, the models rely on incorrect data assumptions and do very badly, especially in West Africa. We talk to the weather company Climacell.org to show how only a few starting stations can strongly influence the accuracy of precipitation forecasts.

bcn: How does it work and why Telos?

de: We use the Telos blockchain to save the data that we collect in our starts. Most weather data is already difficult to obtain due to financing restrictions by the NOAA and the use of outdated data storage. We use the blockchain because it has 100 % operating time and low storage costs for small amounts of data. In addition, with the Smart Contract of Telos we can send rewards for the "mining" digital currencies to the starter of the balloon.

We call it "mining" because the atmospheric pressure always decreases with increasing height and is difficult to fake from someone on site ... Similar to how Bitcoin-Hashes cannot be fake. When the sensor measures lower pressure values, it knows that the balloon has started and sends telos currency accordingly.

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

de: Telos has active communities in Kenya, Zimbabwe and Nigeria and they grow. Telos recently noted at Kucoin, which is widespread in Nigeria as an exit for telos to local currencies. Kanda is currently working with university students in Nigeria, Ghana and Cameroon, but we want to expand into other parts of Africa such as Kenya because of the great rainfall near Lake Victoria. We think that we could also create a lot of value there.

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