Webinar Series

This component of the Space Academy includes a series of webinars covering topics related to the use of EO to assess and monitor the state of water and food security-related spatial components. Each Webinar consists of three sections: theoretical background, applications examples a Q&A session.

The selected topics for the webinars include:

Topic
16   Flood extent assessment in East Africa with Sentinel-2 data
15   Accessing cloud services using openEO and additional data processing capabilities
8 .. 14 2023 Webinar Series
1 .. 7 2022 Webinar Series

16th on the EO AFRICA R&D Facility Webinar Series

Flood extent assessment in East Africa with Sentinel-2 data

A few months ago, East Africa faced the consequences of weeks of heavy rains and subsequent flooding, attributed in part to the El Niño weather phenomenon, impacting Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, and Somalia. According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the flooding has devastated communities, with over 750,000 people affected and 234,000 displaced across the region. Tragically, the death toll continues to rise, with at least 400 fatalities including over 155 deaths in Tanzania and 257 in Kenya, as per local authorities. Flooding in the area resulted in tens of thousands of individuals requiring necessities such as food, shelter, clean water, and healthcare, and thousands of hectares of crops damaged.

Satellite sensors, play a pivotal role in flood monitoring not only to assess hazards but also to support in early warning, mitigation and protection of lives and properties. The European Commission initiated the Copernicus program a few years ago, introducing a novel series of Earth Observation satellites called the Sentinels. In this webinar we’ll utilize commonly used methods to assess the extent of selected flooded area in East Africa. Presented techniques will include calculation of water radiometric indices from optical Sentinel-2 bands (e.g. MNDWI, NDWI2, SWM) to assess the water extent and change detection in selected area. Practical demonstration using open-access software will guide attendees through basic processing steps to achieve desired results.

The duration of the webinar is 1 hour, followed by a live Q&A session. During the webinar there is a live-chat available as well.

The webinar will be executed under the framework of the EO AFRICA R&D Facility by SERCO Italy S.P.A.

Figure 1: Extent of flooded area near Garissa, Kenya, along Tana river, as seen on 29 April 2024 by Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite (image in True-Color (RGB) Band composite: B4, B3, B2). On the left the same area seen by this satellite on 20 April 2023.

Staff:



Downloads and recordings:

The recording of the webinar will soon be available in our YouTube Channel.


15th on the EO AFRICA R&D Facility Webinar Series

Accessing cloud services using openEO and additional data processing capabilities offered by ILWISPy

The EO Africa program has been making use of the Innovation Lab as backbone facility for cloud based access to remote sensing data and subsequent data processing. This webinar starts with the use of the Innovation Lab in conjunction with openEO / ILWISPy to access and process also data obtained from other cloud based data repositories.

Attention will be given to relevant cloud based data repositories which can be used to derive a multitude of datasets, like access to the Sentinel suite of satellite images, other relevant archives through API access, like FAO WaPOR, Copernicus Climate Data Store, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and EUMETSAT’s EUMETView. Last but not least some of the capabilities currently offered by WEkEO will be provided.

After a short introduction on openEO and ILWISPy capabilities developed, the webinar is of a highly demonstrative nature using Jupyter Notebooks showing how to access and process the data from the above mentioned cloud based services.

The duration of the webinar is 1 hour, followed by a live Q&A session. During the webinar there is a live-chat available as well.

The webinar will be executed under the framework of the EO AFRICA R&D Facility by ITC-UTwente.

Speakers:

Downloads and recordings:

You can find the recording of the webinar in our YouTube Channel or you can watch it here:

Previous Webinar Series

Topic
2022 Webinar Series
1   Introduction to Cloud Computing for EO Analyses
2   Access to Earth Observation
3   Software Tools for Earth Observation analyses (SNAP, QGIS)
4   Evapotranspiration from space: methodology and products
5   Introduction to Precipitation from Space
6   Hyper-Temporal Mapping of Agro-Ecological Systems
7   Flood Mapping with Sentinel-1 data
2023 Webinar Series
8   fPAR as a Proxy for Yield Estimation/Forecasting
9   Global flood monitoring and Surface Soil Moisture anomalies
10   Drought Monitoring case studies in Africa
11   Surface Soil Moisture products at continental scale
12   Use of Remote Sensing to Insure against the Peril Drought
13   Parcel-based crop monitoring from space
14   Crop mapping in Zankalon, Egypt using different ML classifiers in Python