Rainfall monitoring with mobile phones
Agriculture, water resource management, drought and flood warnings, etc.: rainfall monitoring is vital in many areas. But the observation networks remain insufficient. This is not the case for antennas for mobile telephones, which cover 90% of the world's inhabited areas. Besides transmitting radio signals, they record signal disturbances, which are partly due to precipitation, in order to monitor the quality of networks. The idea of the Rain Cell Africa consortium researchers is to benefit from this amount of data to improve rainfall monitoring and spatialisation. This is a method whose effectiveness has been proven, with a reliability rate of 95% for detecting rainfall events. This work, which was conducted in Burkina Faso, has just been published in the Geophysical Research Letters journal.