Detecting change in Ecuador
Brandon Winters works to save lives by creating access to new forms of weather-detection technology, with hopes for it to spread further.
By Alanna Voelker
Brandon Winters looked out to the swinging single-plank bridge ahead of him. The other two men had already stumbled their way with shaky legs across this rickety plank, leaving Winters, the biggest of the three, to go last. He knew people crossed the river called the Rio Corozone in Ecuador every day, with much heavier loads of bananas and dragon fruit, yet as he took his first step onto the plank, all he could think about was the raging blue-brown river below. The rushing water, in months past, swept multiple native Ecuadorians away.
Winters had always wanted to use his research for something bigger than himself. As co-chair of the Bethel University Department of Chemistry, he had always been a large part of Bethel’s research team and had a large interest in using new kinds of technology in said research. Winters has worked with and created new open-source 3D printers, as well as using homemade thermal chemical vapor deposition to create new forms of carbon film in the past. Now he has created a technology, he could use to change and save lives by warning natives earlier about weather-related threats. With the help of Bethel students, such as senior biochemistry and molecular biology major Vivian Marchan and capstone students Sam Climaco and Chris Paffel, Winters dedicates his research to creating a new kind of weather technology.
About 20 years ago, Winters took a year-long trip through Covenant Bible College in La Merced, Ecuador. Since this first trip, Winters has returned five times for long periods, with his family even living in the Quito area for three months in 2018.
“It was my first international destination, and as a 21-year-old man, there was something transformative about that experience that left an impression on me,” Winters said. “I had heartache to get back to Ecuador, the same sort of heartache you experience when you miss a loved one, like a cold pain in your chest.”
After a few trips, a conservationist group based in Ecuador called EcoMinga reached out to Winters after seeing some of his technology research. They told Winters about a town called El Placer, a town located on a cliff, around 100 feet above a river in the Andes mountains, and asked if he could help them.
Winters had been developing portable aerosol particle monitors that could be battery-powered and set up anywhere to remotely record aerosol particles for an extended period. This data would then be installed on a data card that could be downloaded on any computer. He planned to continue to develop these monitors to the point where they didn't even need a data card but that the technology would store the data on the cloud by itself. What Winters didn't know was that this technology could and would be transitioned into a remote weather monitoring device with the capabilities of remotely taking down weather data that could be analyzed from anywhere in the world.
After many fatal landslides occurring each year in the town of El Placer, the first location Winters would start work at, conservation groups knew that this town and others around it needed access to technology that could predict these sorts of natural disasters in hopes of quicker evacuation times.
“The work seems challenging when they are so worried about landslides and predicting them, but you know, if anyone could do it, I think Brandon could do it.” — Grant Cooper, brother-in-law
This cause not only caught Winters' attention but also students at Bethel like Vivian Marchan who had in the past months been working with Winters on projects like her home-built open-source spectrometers.
“By improving device communication and accuracy in weather prediction algorithms, it is my hope these stations will have the capacity to alert individuals in those communities of severe weather conditions and potential landslides,” Senior biochemistry and molecular biology major Vivian Marchan said, “I have family out there, so the opportunity to work on something at Bethel that had ramifications in Ecuador was exceedingly motivating and impassioning.”
Using a similar structure to Winters aerosol particle monitors, students help Winters create at-home weather box kits that can predict weather conditions, as well as natural disasters like landslides and floods common in the rainforest and mountain areas of Ecuador. Winters's main goal aside from the technology itself was to make it so that towns like El Placer – towns with little access to technology – could use instructions he created, to begin to create these weather boxes at home for themselves so that anyone, even in places with little access to technology, could have the ability to make their communities safer.
In December of 2023, Winters and his brother-in-law, Grant Cooper, an engineer, went down to El Placer and its neighboring city of Manduriacu. Manduriacu has had troubles with its strong river currents that have in the past years flooded and swept away many of its citizens. The two set up and tested the first versions of the weather detection technology.
This technology could also benefit their economy. Manduriacu is known for its crops, which are the main supporter of their economy. In recent years, the town has been wanting to fall back from their main crops like bananas and dragon fruit, and into sustainable vanilla farming. Vanilla farming would not only be a higher commodity and priced item to sell but it also takes up much less room in their fields, making it a good choice to fall back on, but to do this, the people of Manduriacu need to be able to better monitor weather conditions and possible natural disasters that could get in the way of this vanilla production.
“The work seems challenging when they are so worried about landslides and predicting them,” Cooper said, “but you know, if anyone could do it, I think Brandon could do it.”
Winters plans to return either in the summer or fall of 2024 to install more boxes and check on the one he has already placed. For now, he can monitor the exact weather data in these two cities from the office at Bethel through a website he created. Before he returns he wants to continue to develop more ways to connect to the citizens in Ecuador so he began taking Spanish courses at Bethel with undergrad students.
Winters knew he would have to take risks, such as crossing the dangerous bridge, if he wanted to change lives. So, Winters crossed the one plank-wide swinging bridge and he was able to look out at the brown river raging below, a river that had swept away citizens of Manduriacu because of their lack of warning systems in place for evacuation. Winters would go on to install one of the first open-source weather detection boxes along the river bank in hopes of providing new access to technology to not just these cities, but hopefully hundreds around the world, in hopes of creating change and saving lives.
