OMEN AND CHILDREN IN EAST AFRICAN refugee camps must
often search for hours to find enough firewood to cook. In some African cities,
the poor spend more than half their annual income on cooking fuel.
Volume 5, Number 4 July/August 1997
Technology Transfer
OMEN AND CHILDREN IN EAST AFRICAN refugee camps must
often search for hours to find enough firewood to cook. In some African cities,
the poor spend more than half their annual income on cooking fuel.
Volunteers are using data generated by NASA's Mission to Planet Earth program, a long-term, international study of Earth as a global environmental system, to help East Africans learn to cook with solar energy. "We have found the NASA Surface Solar Energy (SSE) data set to be a wonderful resource, providing reliable data for any location on Earth," said Jay Campbell, a director for Solar Cookers International (SCI), a non-profit Sacramento, California, group that promotes solar cooking technology.
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| A woman cleans her cooker after use. |
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SCI manages solar cooking training in eight refugee camps, as well as less developed areas. In addition, SCI responds to information requests worldwide. Campbell said the NASA SSE data set created by Langley Research Center and Analytical Services and Materials, Inc., Hampton, Virginia, is invaluable to SCI in choosing sites where solar cooking will be most useful to the local population. "This quality of information is simply unavailable from other sources and allows us to make better decisions for our consultations and project plans," he said.
Solar cooking is a clean, safe, convenient, relatively cheap, heat source that reduces smoke, air pollution and deforestation. It also may be used to pasteurize drinking water to help prevent disease.
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| From a Kenyan refugee camp, a solar cook proudly displays her freshly cooked pasta. |
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Dr. Charles Whitlock, the Langley senior research scientist who led the SSE data set development team, said NASA hopes the data may be used to improve designs for solar-assisted electricity systems to provide power to a fraction of the forty percent of the world that has none. Whitlock expects current SSE data to lead to more efficient design of solar-assisted electricity systems for homeowners, communications stations, oil platforms and weather-monitoring instruments.
SSE data set is available via Internet at http://eosweb.larc.nasa.gov/DATDOCS/Surface_Solar_Energy.html Users enter their latitudes and longitudes to receive a one-page printout on the available solar energy in their areas. The global data set, a synthesis of information from several weather satellites, contains 52 monthly averages compared to traditional, individual measurements from isolated surface sensors.
"Release of this data to the Internet will help us answer questions faster and will allow for more specific advice to be given," Campbell said. "Solar cooking provides tremendous health, environmental and financial benefits to those who can use it. Better identification of target areas will help spread this powerful tool farther and faster than before."
For more information, contact Charles Whitlock at Langley Research Center.
Call 757/864-5675
Fax: 757/864-7996
E-mail: c.h.whitlock@larc.nasa.gov
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