Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get.
As we look at ourselves in the mirror every morning, we don’t notice our wrinkles. They gradually increase, without us really realising it. One day, all of a sudden, we’re shocked at the face looking back at us. We strive to get rid of those “new” deep wrinkles, spending money on surgery or cosmetics. If only we had a magic mirror which would have helped us notice the first signs of wrinkles, maybe then we would have undertaken some preventive measures.
Back in 2015, we at Kolba Innovations Lab in Armenia were looking for a similar kind of magic mirror, one that would help us to design preventive measures to fight climate change. More specifically, we wanted to detect the early signs of climate change, so that we could adapt and take action to mitigate the worst effects. As such we announced an open call for innovative ideas for the development of early warning systems for climate change.
The winning idea came from an initiative called Armenian Meteo Project (or AMP for short). Their team suggested to design a network of sensors that monitor range of environmental indicators – air and soil humidity, temperature, air pressure, rainfall, noise and light levels and provide them in a source of open data to all interested users.
All of the hardware and software was to be developed and assembled in Armenia, which together with a careful selection of components and alternative design solutions, would decrease the price of this monitoring set by around ten times from the usual market rate. Cheaper price would allow to deploy them with much bigger density, providing significantly more detailed and local data. Another key point that idea leader was keen to keep this open source technology, so anyone interested can replicate and help develop it further.
After months of preparation, testing and experimentation, we were eager to see if the cheapest possible option would also be one of the smartest solutions. And guess what – it worked!
For the past eight months, five sensors powered by a solar battery alone have been busy collecting data and monitoring changes in the environment.
You can find live information that is being collecting by the prototype here. The data provides details about the current climate in downtown Yerevan.
What’s next and what does this have to do with climate change?
Aleksey Chalabyan, the leader behind the idea, the prototype design and its development, is now in the stage of compiling several similar prototypes, placing them in different parts of the Armenian capital to monitor dynamics and difference in dynamics of those five indicators.
Eventually, the sensors will be able to be used in a variety of places: agriculture, the alternative energy, the hospitality industry, urban planning, transport routes construction and safety, the logistics and more. Once small sensor stations prove to work properly, this can be scaled up to a larger network of sensors.
Over longer run, gathered data from the entire network of sensors would be analyzed to build algorithms that can predict a range of natural disasters – floods, landslides, forest fires, droughts, amongst others – and send out early warning signals to those at risk at specific areas.
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