Open Env. Data Center Ghana-Benin: Env. Monitoring and Data Processing

Idea

Establishment of an interdisciplinary and international open environmental data center in West Africa to support regional agriculture: from sensors, drones and satellites to forecasts and recommendations for action for smallholder farmers.

Installation of a high-performance compute (HPC) servers dedicated to analyse remote sensing images with drones for agriculture, environmental protection and conservation.

First reference project called “Twin Regions” utilizing the environmental data center facility to estimate potential CO2 storage capacities in West Africa.

Collection of own open environmental data

Data analysis and provision

Partners

Roles

People

Germany

BENIN

GHANA

System Architecture

Workshops

Workshop 1, in Germany: First commissioning of technical systems

The two drones for GH and BJ will also be sent to HSRW first to train the African drone pilots and special camera operators. The drone team of the HSRW has already gained experience with the same drone and instrument type and will train the colleagues from Africa.

The three identical HPC servers for DE, GH, BJ will be delivered to HSRW first to install hard- and software. The earth observtion lab team at HSRW has already experience in setting up cloud platforms for remote sensing data analysis with drones. An external expert will be engaged additionally to increase to supervise the system setup and train the workshop participants in system administration, cloud computing, platform as a service, and software as a service. The workshop participants will do an hands-on-traing to implement their cloud computing system. After the workshop two servers will be delivered to Ghana and Benin.

The third part of the workshop covers the installation of weather stations based on semi-professional sensors and own data loogers including data transmission. The workshop participants will learn utilize internet of things technologies (IoT) in conjunction with enviromental and meteorological monitoring.

Workshop 2, in Ghana

Focus on

  1. drone technology (robotics) and
  2. electronic development of own data loggers (IoT technology) as core components for weather stations.

Workshop 3, in Benin

Focus on

  1. Application of drone remote sensing in agriculture,
  2. Vegetation classification,
  3. Biomass estimation

Hardware

High Performance Computing

(Thank you, Moritz Kaimann!)

Weather Station Instruments

Pyranometer

Rain Gauge

Drones

Key Remote Sensing Institutes and Activities in West Africa

Additional non-African Institutes

Some Articles