100 000 Weather Stations to Transform African Agriculture and Climate Resilience

In an effort to tackle one of the world’s major data gaps, Austrian agritech innovator Gottfried Pessl has launched an ambitious plan to set up 100,000 high-quality, professionally operated weather stations across Africa. Elise-Marie Steenkamp reports.

The launch, held on 25 March at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study (STIAS), brought together scientists, agricultural experts, and policy leaders to discuss how Africa cannot feed itself — or adapt to climate change — without reliable, real-time, localised weather data. With Pessl stating: “Weather has no borders – and neither does the data gap threatening African farmers.”

Africa currently has roughly one weather station per 26,000 square kilometres, which is eight times below international meteorological minimum standards.  The continent has only 37 weather radars, compared with 636 across the United States and Europe combined. According to Prof. Guy Midgley, director of Stellenbosch University’s School for Climate Studies, the number of weather stations providing reliable data on the continent peaked at nearly 2 000 in the early 1970s and dropped to fewer than 500 by 2018, with most of those remaining stations located in South Africa.

“When we look at a map of weather stations in Africa, we can clearly see that since 1950, we have lost many weather stations. Only a few remain, and most of them are in South Africa,” Midgley said.

Gottfried Pessl                                                                     Prof. Guy Midgley

The result is a data desert with consequences for farmers and national economies. Pessl’s initiative aims to bring Africa up to the World Meteorological Organisation’s minimum standard for station density, using an innovative tower-sharing model that utilises existing telecommunications infrastructure, making the rollout commercially viable across the continent.

Pessl, founder and CEO of Pessl Instruments, describes the initiative as Africa’s counterpart to the agricultural revolution that converted Brazil’s Cerrado — its expansive tropical savannah — from barren scrubland into one of the world’s most productive farming regions.

“What Brazil generated in the Cerrado was a miracle in terms of maize and soya production. The Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation was instrumental in revolutionising seed production, scientific research, and farm mechanisation. Then they started the weather network,” Pessl said.

Brazil went from being a food importer to generating US$180 billion in agricultural exports — and Pessl argues that data-driven weather intelligence was the critical enabler. His company already operates 12 000 connected weather-monitoring devices in Brazil, making Brazil his largest single market, ahead of the United States.

He pointed out that 60% of Africa’s productive agricultural land remains unutilised or underutilised, and there is no inherent reason why yields across many parts of the continent could not increase by a factor of 2.5. Currently, most farmers still lack the technology or sufficient weather intelligence to make informed decisions. “That is why we are doing this project.”

The launch comes at a moment of mounting urgency. Prof. Midgley delivered a sobering assessment of the global climate trajectory, noting that the last three years have been the hottest on record globally, driven in part by El Niño conditions in the Pacific.

“Global temperatures have stepped up. The climate is now in a new state. The data is very clear. If you still don’t believe in climate change, you are delusional.”

Midgley drew on deep geological time to put the current moment into perspective, noting that the Holocene — the 9 000-year period of climatic stability that supported agriculture and the rise of human civilisation — is giving way to a new climatic epoch. He warned that the warming trend is now fixed, making adaptation, not just mitigation, an urgent priority for African agriculture.

He also issued an important warning against uncritically copying Brazil’s model. In Brazil, the use of weather data had an unintended consequence: it sped up deforestation as new land was cleared for cultivation. Midgley emphasised that Africa must follow a different route.

“If we are going to succeed in Africa, we should take the environment into account. We cannot use the data to destroy natural resources and ecosystems.”

Midgley also said that farmers who invest in shade netting to protect crops from hail and heat stress are, in effect, already investing in climate resilience — and he argued these costs could be claimed from the international community as loss and damage expenditure under climate finance frameworks.

Dr Tara Southey of Terraclim emphasised that the mere availability of weather data does not automatically translate into better farming decisions — a problem she described as the central challenge facing African agriculture.

“We have more weather information than ever before. Yet, decision uncertainty remains. The challenge is turning weather data into reliable action and making decisions we can trust.”

Southey identified several critical gaps: a temporal gap, because crops respond to extreme events rather than averages; a variable gap, because weather data alone does not capture the full spectrum of agricultural risk; and an integration gap, where siloed data systems produce dashboards rather than actionable insights. She warned that incomplete data creates false confidence — sometimes more dangerous than no data at all.

The Pessl initiative addresses this through the FieldClimate platform, which processes data from the station network and applies agentic AI to translate raw meteorological readings into farm-level intelligence: disease forecasts, pest migration alerts, irrigation planning cues, and frost risk warnings delivered directly to farmers.

“The most powerful AI agri tools in the world are useless without taking the local weather into account. AI is only as good as the data it gets.”

Dr Ilse Trautmann, former deputy director-general for Agricultural Research and Regulatory Services at the Western Cape Department of Agriculture, serves on the advisory board of the initiative and offered a ground-level perspective on the challenge of reaching smallholder farmers with data-driven tools.

“When I was still at the department and got CASP funding for smallholder farmers, I asked them what they needed, and weather stations were never on their shopping list. That must change. Weather data is not just a nice-to-have.”

Trautmann described the lack of resources to adopt modern, data-driven practices as one of the primary barriers for African smallholder farmers and noted that too many decisions are still made on guesswork rather than scientific data. She argued that new and emerging farmers cannot progress unless they have access to the same information systems as large commercial operators — and that they are disproportionately exposed to climate risk precisely because they lack this access.

Jan Vermaak of Winfield United said that the initiative’s commercial and strategic vision underpins it, framing Africa’s agricultural data deficit not just as a humanitarian concern but as an untapped economic opportunity.

“Africa could be two to three times more productive if it intensified its agricultural productivity. We can become the breadbasket of the world. But we need to take data and turn it into knowledge and wisdom to unlock financial gains and increase competitiveness.”

The business model underpinning the network is designed to be self-sustaining: Pessl Instruments provides the platform, commercial and institutional partners monetise the network, and farmers access actionable intelligence through an affordable subscription model — similar, Pessl suggested, to a mobile phone contract.

The 100,000-station project does not start from scratch. Between 2021 and 2023, Pessl Instruments tested a smaller version of the model through the Eureka Climate Smart Agriculture project in the Western Cape, which installed over 200 networked weather stations across the province. Funded partly by the governments of Austria and South Africa, as well as a European tech innovation fund, the Eureka project offered vital lessons in managing a weather network at scale.

The company already has approximately 1,300 high-tech weather stations deployed in South Africa, mostly through its local partner, Metos SA, a foundation on which the continental expansion can be built.

“It is now Africa’s Cerrado moment. The infrastructure is ready. The data revolution can begin. Africa is at a crucial turning point. The continent is both the most vulnerable to climate change and the most lacking in data — yet it possesses the greatest untapped agricultural potential,” Pessl said.

The 100,000-station network will not resolve the climate crisis, and several attendees warned against the arrogance of believing that data alone can bring prosperity. Environmental care, fair access, and sensible policies must go hand in hand with the technology.