His grandfather told him stories about the rain prophets. Raul Souza taught a machine to listen.
Iracema, Ceará, Brazil (Jaguaribe Valley, sertão) · Raul Victor Magalhães Souza
Published July 18, 2026
In Brazil's semi-arid sertão, official forecasts kept missing the local rain that smallholder farmers depend on. A 16-year-old encoded the observations of six traditional rain prophets, crossed them with 43 years of weather records, and reached 94.5% accuracy.
The story
The person and the place
Raul Victor Magalhães Souza is a 16-year-old public-school student from Iracema, in the Jaguaribe Valley of Brazil's Ceará sertão.
The problem
In the semi-arid sertão, the official weather models often miss at the local scale where farming families decide when to plant. Raul grew up on his grandfather Luiz Maia's stories of the rain prophets, local observers who forecast the season by reading animal behavior, plants, and sky. One story stayed with him: in 2009, the prophets saw floods coming that the conventional models missed.
The moment he didn't wait
Instead of leaving the tradition as folklore, Raul wrote it down as data. With his professor's mentorship and a university lab as partner, he encoded ten parameters from six rain prophets across five municipalities, signs in the atmosphere, in plants, and in animal behavior, and cross-referenced them against 43 years of official meteorological records, building the tool himself in Python.
His tool, Inteligência Artificial dos Profetas da Chuva, reached 94.5% accuracy in local rainfall prediction, coverage describing it as five times more assertive than conventional models for those communities. Tested against the 2025 rainy season, it estimated 422.1 mm of rain; 431.5 mm actually fell. The project won the high-school category of Brazil's 31st Prêmio Jovem Cientista, then the Brazil stage of the Stockholm Junior Water Prize, and in August 2026 he presents it at the world final in Stockholm. "Tenho que agradecer ao meu avó, minha principal referência e base para a construção do projeto," he said at the ceremony. I have to thank my grandfather, my main reference and the foundation for building this project.
"Tenho que agradecer ao meu avó, minha principal referência e base para a construção do projeto." (I have to thank my grandfather, my main reference and the foundation for building this project.) — Raul Victor Magalhães Souza, at the Stockholm Junior Water Prize Brazil ceremony
Verified sources
Sources
Every claim in this story is checked against primary sources. Verify it yourself.
Sources last verified July 19, 2026.