Climate Data Working Group Plan Advances

Latin America Update

Climate Data Working Group Plan Advances

By Jose Loyola, Latin America Director

The LATAM Steering Committee met at the end of January to discuss actions in the region and to set the calendar for member meetings that will take place this year. All 2023 in-person meetings will be held from 10:00 am to 4:00 pm. The meeting schedule will be available soon.

Also last month, LATAM representatives José Alexandre Loyola (Regional Director) and Miro Lima (Meteoblue) had an online alignment meeting with AgGateway Portfolio Manager Ben Craker to discuss the scope of a potential new Working Group that would start this year on climate data. The next step will be to host a meetup of members to confirm the scope, timeline, and deliverables and then invite members to join the WG and start the project.

For background, this new Working Group initiative emerged from the increasing need within the agricultural industry to share weather and forecast data. This data is available and consumed by a multitude of companies using proprietary, one-off API connections around the world. This process consumes substantial development resources on both sides to develop and maintain company specific integrations. Agreeing to a standardized set of APIs for sharing this information within the agricultural industry will make connections easier to maintain, lowering the costs required to connect to new data sources. This will ultimately free companies to focus more on developing their services and product offerings instead of on getting bogged down with data integration.

The proposed scope of the Working Group currently is to document the primary use cases related to weather forecast data to identify the key data elements. These use cases, process models, and data elements and definitions will serve as the basis to identify, and gap check any existing standards that may be applicable. This documentation will then be passed along, likely to a subsequent working group that will develop a standardized API specification that meets the needs of the industry based on the use cases. One final note: On the 22nd and 23rd of March, we will have a National Symposium on Digital Agriculture in Piracicaba, promoted by our member ESALQ.