Mary-Louise Hoffman
An IBM weather analytics technology has been adopted by the Flint River Partnership to aid in water conservation efforts along the lower portion of Georgia’s Flint River basin.
The Flint River Partnership uses IBM’s Deep Thunder climate forecasting tool to help farmers manage irrigation scheduling as well as minimize the impact of drought, IBM said Thursday.
According to IBM, the platform works to give agricultural users access to weather information and other relavant field data on mobile devices anytime.
“Farming operations are highly sensitive to weather. In the US, that sensitivity is about $15 billion per year,” said Lloyd Treinish, IBM distinguished engineer and chief scientist.
“By better understanding and then predicting these weather effects, we can help mitigate these impacts,†Treinish added.
Deep Thunder is designed to operate with GPS-based farm equipment and in-field sensors and sends mobile weather predictions 78 hours in advance.
IBM also provided its SoftLayer cloud architecture to the Flint River Partnership with the aim of helping farmers calculate how much water a crop needs at each stage of its entire life cycle.
The project is a collaborative effort of the Natural Resources Conservation Service, the Nature Conservancy and the Flint River Soil and Water Conservation District.
