Skip to content

Concrete input

In this example we utilize these two questions for concrete, specific input.

  1. What specific times of year are you most vulnerable to drought?
  2. What were the most severe drought years you have experienced?

The drought years are ordered in severity by the community, with 1 being the worst year.

For strategies that have been low cost and scalable in effectively framing these questions to communities, you can refer to Project Field Guides

Crosscheck Example

For our example, this has proven to be an effective crosscheck using satellite data and focus group input.

  1. Check the satellite rainfall data during the times of the season for the lowest rainfall years
  2. Compare against the list of years from the focus groups

This provides a simultaneous statistical test of the accuracy of

  1. focus group seasonal timing reporting
  2. focus group drought severity ranking
  3. satellite rainfall data

If the drought years agree between the satellite data focused on reported seasonal timing and the drought years remembered, then that is a statistical test demonstrating accuracy of all datasets.

If the datasets do not agree, we do not know which are inaccurate.

But we can explore timing parameters to optimize fit using various statistical and performance metrics.