Multimodal Satellite Rainfall Measurement for Index Insurance

Ralph Lin and Kathryn Vasilaky of Groundtruth, LLC in the U.S. will develop a new approach to more accurately measure rainfall across farming regions in developing countries so that insurers can make more informed and rapid decisions for paying out to small-scale farmers with insurance against seasonal crop loss. This will also help farmers decide the best time to plant their crops, which is critical for maximizing yield. Satellite data are not currently accurate or stable enough to measure rainfall over small areas. They will further develop their existing low-cost field sensors to automatically upload rainfall data to a cloud server, and develop an SMS-platform that allows farmers to register their own rainfall measurements on the same server. Combining these two methods, along with satellite data, should improve the confidence of the measurements. They will recruit farmers in India to test their approach and help optimize it.