Nairobi – Kenya will launch its first localised weather modelling system early next year, providing key data on how climate change will impact crop production across the east African nation in the decades to come, the project’s founder said on Tuesday.
Developed by researchers at Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology, the Climate Atlas will provide projections on rainfall and temperature patterns across Kenya’s 47 counties from the year 2050 to 2100.
John Wesonga, lead developer of the web-based Climate Atlas platform, said there were countless global climate modelling systems available, but none provided localised data for Kenya over a long period.
“The Climate Atlas will provide us with future scenarios of what the weather patterns will be like at a county-level in Kenya,” Wesonga told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“We are looking for data such as in which locations will we see the highest and lowest temperatures and rainfall, how high and low will the temperatures and rainfall likely to be, what time of year they will happen, and how long they will last.”
