For the 2022 Open Data Day GGM Hackathon (5 March), we decided to focus on the curation of a hail events dataset for South Africa from observations posted on social media. This proved to be a great challenge for the students!

In preparation for the hackathon, we were honoured to have Tim Sutton present an overview of data scraping to the students on Friday. Tim is a former QGIS project chair and current director at Kartoza. He presented the Node-Red, low-code programming for event-driven applications, to the students as a possible tool that can be used for data scraping. The co-organiser, Prof Liesl Dyson, also presented the motivation for the hackathon to the students and the need for a hail-events dataset. The recording of the presentations is available here:

On the day, we had 9 students join the event. The group was a mix of undergraduate and postgraduate students from geoinformatics and meteorology. We teamed up with postgraduate and undergraduate students so that they can learn from each other. The following Monday, the students presented their results, and the following students were announced as the winners:

1st prize winners

• Terisha Pillay (BScHons Geoinformatics)
• Tsholanang Rammopo (MSc Meteorology)

2nd prize winners

• Marinet Blom (BSc Geoinformatics)
• Riley Kamstra (BScHons Geoinformatics)

3rd prize winner

• Ruvé Benadie (BScHons Geoinformatics)

We would like to thank, Kartoza for sponsoring the prizes, especially Tim Sutton for presenting, Gavin Fleming for coordinating, and Amy Burness for coming through to the event to speak with the students. We greatly appreciate Kartoza's support!

We are working on finalizing the hail events dataset and will hopefully be able to publish this dataset soon.