DHIS2 Climate Tools contains open source libraries and workflows that you can use to access, process and upload local and global climate, weather and environmental data to DHIS2 and the Chap Modeling Platform. It is an open, collaborative toolkit that can be adapted to local needs and where best practices can be shared.
It fulfills the same purpose as the DHIS2 Climate App, allowing climate, weather and environmental data to be harmonized with health data in DHIS2 for combined analysis and forecasting. While the Climate App is an easy way to get started with a curated selection of data sources, DHIS2 Climate Tools gives you the power to integrate any dataset. As Climate Tools is something you run locally to download and process data, there is no dependency on Google Earth Engine.
This toolkit is intended for two primary audiences with programming skills:
- Data engineer: Use DHIS2 Climate Tools to integrate climate and environmental data from different sources, aggregating data to country regions (organisation units) to align it with health data and import the result into DHIS2.
- Data scientist: Analyze and visualize climate data using tools and techniques that are not available in DHIS2. Climate Tools will allow you to work on raw data that contains more detail than data aggregated to organisation units.
The toolkit is based on the Python programming language and ecosystem. Python is the leading programming language for geospatial analysis, offering a rich ecosystem of libraries and tools that DHIS2 Climate Tools builds on. This makes complex spatial operations accessible to both beginners and advanced users.
Our goal is to use existing tools as much as possible and only provide custom solutions where we need to fill the gaps. We use Xarray to work with gridded climate data, GeoPandas to work with organisation units from DHIS2, and earthkit to aggregate data in space and time. In addition, we provide two core libraries that streamline data download, converting between formats and uploading to DHIS2:
- dhis2eo: Provides functions to access climate and environmental data directly from the source like the Climate Data Store and Climate Hazard Center. It also provides functions to convert earth observation data to a DHIS2 format.
- dhis2-python-client: A lightweight and simple way to work with the DHIS2 Web API from a Python environment. It allows you to upload data to DHIS2 with a few lines of code.
To demonstrate how these tools work together we provide a growing set of runnable notebooks where we combine code with detailed explanations. This guide has been developed by HISP UiO and our partners in the HISP network. DHIS2 Climate Tools is already a collaborative toolkit – and we welcome input and contributions from the global DHIS2 community.
How to get started with DHIS2 Climate Tools?
- Check out the website: climate-tools.dhis2.org
- Join our Climate Tools Webinar on February 4th
- Ask questions on our Community of Practice page
DHIS2 Climate Tools is part of the DHIS2 for Climate & Health project which aims to break climate and health data out of silos to facilitate combined analysis and forecasting, and strengthen climate-resilient health systems.
DHIS2 for Climate & Health is funded with a grant from Wellcome.