Customized Irrigation and Climate Advisory Service through Citizen Science

This project in collaborate with the Pakistan Council of Research in Water Resources (PCRWR) focuses to evolve an already existing Irrigation Advisory Service (IAS) to Irrigation and Climate Advisory Service (ICAS). This evolution will lead to accurate weather forecasting by taking into account satellite data, Citizen Science Data, and Automatic Weather Station (AWS) data.

Many times, satellite data does not lead to accurate weather forecasts because of either the delay in data acquisition or rapidly changing local climatic conditions. The inaccuracy in forecasts makes it difficult to decide about crops’ water requirements and 7-day future predictions as well. This project enables local data acquisition in real-time via mobile applications interfaced with various climate sensors (rainfall, air pressure, temperature, etc.) The mobile application is directly used by farmers to provide the sensors’ data on a daily basis which is integrated with Automatic Weather Station data and analyzed to find a correction factor that can be subsequently be applied to satellite data for generating correct weather forecasts. This leads to better judgments about water requirements by the crops and hence cause better nourishment of the yield.