tom231826-svg/heatbell

Open-source AI school-heat advisory & learning continuity for South Sudan — county-level forecasts instead of blanket school closures # HeatBell **Open-source AI school-heat advisory and learning continuity — built for South Sudan, designed for replication in any heat-exposed LDC.** > **Status: working prototype.** HeatBell runs end-to-end today — offline on a > bundled sample and live against Open-Meteo > forecasts. It is **not deployed with an education authority**, its tier > thresholds are pilot defaults that **must be calibrated with health and > education officials**, and its enrollment figures are illustrative > placeholders. It is advisory decision support, not an early-warning mandate: > **the education authority decides.** --- ## The problem South Sudan has closed **every school in the country** over extreme heat two years in a row — about two weeks in March 2024 as temperatures headed for 45 °C, and two weeks again from February 2025 after children collapsed from heatstroke in Juba. World Weather Attribution found that climate change made the February 2025 heat **"at least 2°C hotter and at least 10 times more likely"** — this is now an every-year hazard, in the country with one of the world's most fragile school systems. A nationwide blanket closure is the bluntest possible instrument: it costs millions of children weeks of learning in counties that were merely warm, while giving the hottest counties no earlier warning than anyone else. **HeatBell turns the blanket nationwide closure into a county-by-county precision response** — computed days ahead from free public forecasts, ranked transparently, and delivered in the formats South Sudan actually uses: a decision brief for the ministry and education cluster, a radio script, and SMS texts. ## What it does ```text Open-Meteo daily forecast (free, no key) config/southsudan.yaml (12 county seats) \ / v v NOAA heat index (county x day, °C) | risk tiers: normal / elevated / high / extreme (+ escalation: 3+ consecutive hot days raise one tier) | school-week view + dete …