About Tinga Lens

Independent maps of Ghana's land, water and weather, district by district.

Satellites record a great deal about Ghana every day, but most of it sits in files that are hard to open and harder to read. Tinga Lens takes those public records and turns them into plain maps and figures for each district: how dry it is, where fires are burning, how green the land is, how much forest has gone and how fast towns are growing.

It is meant for people who need to know what is happening on the land and do not have a remote sensing team: farmers' groups, district officers, journalists, students and researchers.

Purpose

Tinga Lens turns public satellite records into plain maps and figures for every district in Ghana, so that farmers' groups, district officers, journalists, students and researchers can see what is happening on the land without needing a remote sensing team.

For any district it aims to answer questions such as: Is it drier or wetter than usual? Where are fires burning? Where is forest being lost? Which land is cropland, which crops are likely grown there, and what do the soils hold? Where does water gather when it floods?

The maps are meant to help people understand conditions and ask better questions. They are not forecasts, farm advice or a replacement for field knowledge, a soil test or official statistics. Its next step is to add more of the agricultural picture, such as soil fertility, district by district, while saying plainly where each figure comes from and how far it can be trusted.

The name

Tinga means "land" in Gurune, a language of Ghana's Upper East Region. The word covers the earth underfoot, the soil a family farms and the place a community calls home. A lens brings something into focus. Tinga Lens is a closer look at the land.

What it is not

Tinga Lens is not a warning service. For forecasts, warnings and emergencies, go to the Ghana Meteorological Agency and the National Disaster Management Organisation.

About the Founder

Frank Anyoka Adekilae is a Ghanaian researcher in soil hydrology and remote sensing, and the founder of Tinga Lens.

Frank grew up in northern Ghana, where rainfall and drought shaped harvests, livelihoods and everyday decisions. He studied Natural Resources Management at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, then took an Erasmus Mundus master's degree in Soils and Global Change at universities in Europe. He is now a doctoral researcher in soil physics and remote sensing in the United States, where he studies soil moisture and drought using ground observations and satellite data.

He started Tinga Lens in 2026. Satellites observe Ghana every day, and he wanted more of that information to reach the people who live and work there, in a form that is easy to find and read and that says plainly where each figure comes from and what it cannot show.

Frank leads the scientific and technical work: he chooses the datasets, designs the methods, builds the processing and reviews each map before it is published.

Independence

Tinga Lens is an independent project, built and run in the founder's own time. It is not affiliated with any university, company or government agency.

Everything here comes from public datasets and from code written for this project. No university research code, unpublished models or restricted data are used.

Get in touch

Questions, corrections and reports from the ground are welcome. See Contact us.

How to cite

To cite Tinga Lens as a whole:

Adekilae, F. A. (2026). Tinga Lens: Environmental monitoring for Ghana (Version 1.0.0) [Computer software]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23271190

The DOI identifies the archived platform release. The live site, tingalens.org, is updated weekly and those updates are not archived separately, so for a map or figure also give the date you viewed it.

To cite one map or figure, use the "Cite this map" text beside the map. It names the map, its period and version, the date you viewed it, and the original data source, for example:

Adekilae, F. A. (2026). Rainfall compared with normal: Jun to Aug 2026, against 1991–2020. Tinga Lens, product version 1.1. https://tingalens.org/pages/drought.html#drought. Accessed 3 October 2026. Source data: CHIRPS v3.0.

Please also credit the original data provider named on each map. The maps change as new data arrive, so always give the date you viewed them.

Using the data

Where Tinga Lens holds rights in its results and text, you may reuse them under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 licence (CC BY-NC 4.0), for non-commercial use; to use them commercially, write to contact@tingalens.org. Please credit Tinga Lens and the original data source named on each map; that source's own licence always applies too. Species records come from GBIF (only records under CC0 or CC BY are used; please credit GBIF and the download DOI). Tinga Lens does not publish IUCN Red List categories. The code is open under the MIT licence. The Tinga Lens name and logo are not part of these licences. See Data & methods for sources, limits and versions, and the licence notice.