ESA's TIGER Initiative is all about generating sustainable Earth Observation services for integrated water resources management in developing nations, its main focus on Africa.
Since its launch last year, a number of ESA water-related Earth Observation projects have already been started. Then this summer saw the TIGER Announcement of Opportunity, making Envisat and ERS data freely available for African hydrology research.
The responses span the African continent as well as various stages of the water cycle. One proposal from Burkina Faso is to combine radar and multispectral imagery from Envisat as well as data from ERS and Japan's past JERS-1 satellites to guide well diggers to sites most likely to yield underground water. Regional deforestation will also be observed.
In Sudan one proposal is to use Earth Observation to improve the effectiveness of 'water harvesting' from wadis shallow desert river courses in the country's Red Sea Hills, while another team seeks to develop flood forecasting and early warning system for the Gash River, shared between Sudan, Eritrea and Ethiopia, and prone to burst its banks once every five years.
Major changes that have occurred in wetland environments in Senegal, Chad and Liberia during the last few decades are identified using satellite data in order to establish recommendations for their sustainable management. And satellite-based watershed management maps for Thukela in South Africa and Pangani in Tanzania are to be created in order to better optimise agricultural w
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Contact: Josef Aschbacher
josef.aschbacher@esa.int
33-153-697-707
European Space Agency
3-Nov-2004