Projects

Building low cost meteorological station

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Building low cost mobile weather station for drought study in Nepal

Every year, Nepal suffers from a decline in agricultural outputs due to climate extremes such as floods and droughts. Recurrent droughts have depressed rural economies and enhanced widespread hunger and human migration to cities. However due to lack of sufficient hydrological/meteorological measurement stations, poor access to satellite data, insufficient rainfall prediction capability, and shortages of well-trained staff accurate determination of climatic hazards, its impact and early detection facilities are not present in Nepal. The proposed project seeks to address some of these deficiencies in scientific manner by building low cost mobile weather station and distribute this technology among Nepali communities. Kathmandu Institute of Applied Science will build a low-cost weather station and it will be calibrated with the standard automatic weather station in collaboration with Utah University, USA. This will furthermore fulfil our aim to collect sufficient hydro-meteorological data for the validation of satellite products in order to establish a drought monitoring and forecasting system in Nepal. This is two-year project and funded by Early Career Women Scientist (ECWS), a UNESCO programme, hosted by The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS).