In Kenya, forecasters can tell you tomorrow's weather and the outlook for the season ahead. But farmers deciding when to plant have long lacked forecasts for the period in between: what the next one to six weeks will bring. In this conversation, Jeff Albert of The Aquaya Institute talks with Chris Funk, director of the Climate Hazards Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Phillip Okello Ochieng, a meteorologist with the Kenya Meteorological Department, about closing that gap together. The research agenda came from Kenyan meteorologists themselves. They explain how 45 years of rainfall data from the Climate Hazards Group InfraRed Precipitation with Station data (CHIRPS) are blended with readings from 3D-printed weather stations that Kenyan staff build for about $500. They also discuss how county-level forecasts reach people in local languages by text message, and how this year's strong El Niño is testing preparedness compared with the 2023 Tana River floods.

When a household in an underserved community gets a piped water connection, do the neighbors benefit too? It's a common assumption, but new research from Accra, Ghana, suggests the answer is more complicated than most people think.

In this episode, you'll hear directly from four people involved in the study: Faustina Boachie, Chief Manager of the Low Income Customer Support Department at Ghana Water Limited; Haleemah Qureshi, Senior Research Manager at Aquaya Institute; Frederick Goddard, Senior Research Data Scientist at Aquaya Institute; and Liz Jordan, former Chief of Party of the USAID Urban WASH Project.

Read the full paper in PLOS Water: https://aquaya.org/benefits-of-piped-water-connections-in-accra-ghana/

What does it mean to build “climate resilient” water supply and water resource systems? Answering that question convincingly requires properly understanding the nature of climate hazards and how they might affect water availability. The global climate system is complex: rainfall varies considerably across seasons, across regions, and (especially) across climate cycles (e.g. El Niño / La Niña). Understanding variability and the multiple influences on regional climate is essential to planning for extreme events. Today, teams of scientists from different countries are brought together by UC’s Santa Barbara’s Climate Hazards Center to make reliable drought forecasts for many parts of the world up to 8 months in advance. They do this by using estimated rainfall distributions over the entire planet at high spatial temporal resolution (think one-day or 5-day accumulations at 5 x 5 km grid resolution for the entire planet) going back over four decades and comparing them with robust estimates of sea surface temperatures (which are used to determine the strength climate oscillations like El Niño). In this episode of the REAL-Water podcast, we speak with CHC director Chris Funk about how to generate meaningful climate data products and forecast analysis, and just as importantly, how those resources are already being used to protect livelihoods.