Yang Hong
Name: Yang Hong 
Title/Department: Professor of hydro-meteorology-climatology and remote sensing, School of Civil Engineering & Environmental Sciences and in the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma
Phone number: (405)325-3644
Email: yanghong@ou.edu
Website: http://hydro.ou.edu/people/yang-hong/
Research focus: My research lies in the interdisciplinary areas of hydrometeorology and remote sensing technologies, with particular interest in the nexus of the water-weather-climate-human systems across scales in space and time.
What excites you most about your PIRE research? I am excited to lead young experts who will develop and customize the smart phone mPING (meteorological Phenomena Identification near Ground) app heritage to Ethiopia smart phone crowdsourcing apps (ePING). This state-of-the-art Apps will then be used to collect hydrometeorological observations such as precipitation types, soil wetness and vegetation/crop stress information by Blue Nile River Basin stakeholders and/or local users.
What’s the most valuable aspect of your research for the people and communities? Local farmers in the Blue Nile Region collect data; we process it using newly developed Apps. Ultimately, we broadcast the scientific information back to local farmers in a language and level of complexity they can understand it. Thus by blending formal science with citizen science, we engage local farmers and provide them with scientific information necessary in their crop growing decisions.