The project EO AFRICA Water Resources Management (WRM), promoted by ESA – European Space Agency – aims to develop and validate experimental EO analysis techniques to estimate crop water stress and evapotranspiration by exploiting EO data.
The background
The agricultural sector is already the largest user of water resources, accounting for roughly 70% of all freshwater withdrawals globally and requires even more water to sustain the continuous demand for food and biomass fostered by the population growth and changes in rainfall and temperature patterns caused by climate change. This is a leading cause of an increase in competition and conflicts among users and sectors, especially in water-limited areas, for the use of this important resource.
For a challenge as consequential as this, the frontline action to sustainable solution must include a responsive mechanism for measuring how much of this resource is added and how much is removed; because “if you can’t measure something, it becomes really difficult to manage it.”
In order to reposition the agricultural sector for better water management, this experiment seeks to carry out a thorough re-evaluation of water losses through evaporation from soil and transpiration by crops. This precise measurement of moisture presents a unique approach for water management in irrigation farming, and to do so at scale accurately and affordably, thermal EO offers an opportunity for precise estimation of water requirements on a crop by crop basis, and planning a more efficient irrigation schedule.
With better monitoring of water consumption, we can minimise vulnerabilities in the sector and thereby improving farmers’ resilience to climate change and other related uncertainties. EO Africa Water Resource Management project aims to validate open-source models for predicting actual evapotranspiration on a farm field using a comparative EO-derived data.
To read more about EO Africa Explorer, click this link: https://eoafrica-rd.org
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