WeatherInformant is an interactive climate analytics dashboard built with R Shiny to explore historical temperature and rainfall patterns across Kenya's 46 counties. The application transforms nearly three decades of meteorological data into interactive visualizations and statistical summaries that support climate research, agricultural planning, and evidence-based decision-making.
This application was developed using historical climate data obtained for academic purposes.
To protect data licensing requirements and confidentiality, a public deployment is not available.
The repository includes:
- Complete source code
- Documentation
- Statistical methodology
- Dashboard screenshots
- Project report
These resources provide a comprehensive overview of the application's functionality and implementation.
Climate variability poses significant challenges to agriculture, water resource management, infrastructure development, disaster preparedness, and public health in Kenya.
Although historical climate records are available, they are often distributed across static reports that make exploratory analysis difficult. Decision-makers require interactive tools that enable them to understand long-term climate trends, compare counties, and identify spatial and temporal climate patterns.
This project demonstrates how statistical computing and interactive visualization can transform historical climate data into actionable insights.
WeatherInformant analyzes monthly temperature and rainfall records collected between 1990 and 2018 across 46 Kenyan counties.
Using an interactive R Shiny dashboard, users can explore:
- Long-term temperature trends
- Rainfall variability
- County-level climate comparisons
- Seasonal climate patterns
- Statistical summaries
- Interactive visualizations for decision support
The dashboard was developed as part of a Master's course in Statistical Computing and has been enhanced as a professional portfolio project.
The dashboard supports evidence-based climate analysis by enabling stakeholders to:
- Monitor long-term climate variability
- Compare climate characteristics across counties
- Support agricultural planning
- Assist drought preparedness and adaptation planning
- Inform environmental research
- Support county-level policy development
The project aims to:
- Analyze long-term temperature trends across Kenya.
- Examine rainfall variability between 1990 and 2018.
- Compare climate characteristics across counties.
- Identify seasonal and regional climate patterns.
- Visualize historical climate data interactively.
- Support climate-informed decision-making.
Source
Kenya Meteorological Department
Coverage
- Period: 1990–2018
- Observations: 16,008 monthly records
- Geographic Coverage: 46 Kenyan counties
- Temporal Resolution: Monthly
- Year
- Month
- County
- Mean Temperature (°C)
- Maximum Temperature (°C)
- Minimum Temperature (°C)
- Monthly Rainfall (mm)
- Date
Meteorological Data
↓
Data Cleaning
↓
Exploratory Data Analysis
↓
Descriptive Statistics
↓
Trend Analysis
↓
County Comparison
↓
Interactive Visualization
↓
Climate Decision Support
The application provides:
- Mean temperature trends
- Maximum temperature trends
- Minimum temperature trends
- Rainfall trend visualization
- County selection
- Year filtering
- Dynamic plots
- Interactive statistical summaries
- Descriptive statistics
- Climate comparisons
- Long-term trend analysis
- Temporal climate exploration
- County climate profiling
- Climate variability assessment
- Regional comparison
- Evidence-based climate insights
- R
- Shiny
- ggplot2
- dplyr
- tidyverse
- lubridate
- DT
- shiny
- readxl
- Kenya Meteorological Department
Analysis of the historical climate data reveals several important observations:
- Northern counties consistently experience higher average temperatures than the central highlands.
- Western Kenya receives substantially higher rainfall than arid northern counties.
- Temperature and rainfall exhibit clear seasonal patterns across regions.
- County-level comparisons highlight significant spatial climate variability.
- Long-term climate visualization supports environmental planning and climate adaptation initiatives.
This dashboard can support:
- Kenya Meteorological Department
- County Governments
- Agricultural Researchers
- Environmental Scientists
- Climate Researchers
- Disaster Risk Management Agencies
- NGOs
- Students and Researchers
Kenya_Climate_Analytics_Dashboard/
│── app.R
│── README.md
│── LICENSE
│── .gitignore
│
├── data/
│
├── images/
│
├── report/
│
└── presentation/
This project strengthened my skills in statistical computing with R, interactive dashboard development using Shiny, exploratory climate data analysis, and communicating complex environmental data through intuitive visualizations. It also improved my ability to transform long-term meteorological datasets into decision-support tools for researchers, policymakers, and agricultural stakeholders.
Potential enhancements include:
- Deploy the dashboard using shinyapps.io
- Integrate real-time weather APIs
- Add interactive GIS mapping
- Include climate anomaly detection
- Implement rainfall forecasting models
- Develop downloadable climate reports
- Add predictive analytics for climate trends
The dataset used in this project originates from historical climate observations collected by the Kenya Meteorological Department and is used solely for educational and analytical purposes. The dashboard is intended to demonstrate statistical computing, interactive visualization, and climate analytics techniques.
This project is released under the MIT License.
Allan
Master's Student in Data Science | Data Scientist | Statistical Computing | Machine Learning | Business Intelligence
GitHub: https://github.com/AllanDS-coder