Drought occurs when the water in a region is insufficient for its needs. Water is needed for natural vegetation, for agriculture as drinking water, and in many places for power generation, In drought conditions these needs can come into conflict with each other. Since agriculture is a heavy water user, the result is often a food shortage. As climate change causes weather patterns to move away from historic trends, droughts can occur in areas where they have not happened before, while the severity of droughts is expected to increase.
Within ESA’s EO AFRICA initiative, a series of projects have been launched to look at how EO data can help to manage water in different parts of Africa. Some of these have been research projects to devise new methods using existing and future EO data streams, while others have been run as National Incubators, aiming to build up capacity in a country or region. In most cases the results and experience build up in one country could be readily transferred to another.
The data coming from the current fleet of Sentinel spacecraft is particularly suitable for developing operational services. However many of the projects have investigated how newer types of satellite data (such as hyperspectral or thermal data) could be used to develop operational services in the future. At the moment some sources of these data are already available (such as PRISMA for hyperspectral and ECOSTRESS for thermal), but in a few years these data should become available through the Copernicus Expansion Missions.
Image credit: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data, processed by ESA.
