Egor Prikaziuk and Michael Marshall from the water and natural resources departments of the faculty-ITC, University of Twente facilitated the main stakeholder engagement event of the ESA HyRelief project. It consisted of a 4-day tutorial hosted at the RCMRD in Nairobi, Kenya. The title of the tutorial was “Dryland Drought Monitoring with Evapotranspiration from Space.”
In the first two days of the tutorial, 13 participants from the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock Development, National Drought Monitoring Authority, Kenya Meteorological Department, International Livestock Institute, and RCMRD acquired a foundation in evapotranspiration and potential evapotranspiration modeling via presentations and exercises utilizing WaPOR. On the third day, the participants visited the main study area of the HyRelief project (Kapiti Ranch Research Station) to become more familiar with arid semi-arid lands (ASALs) and the field experiments the project conducted to calibrate/validate satellite information. On the last day, the participants learned advanced hyperspectral and thermal infrared satellite-based evapotranspiration modeling techniques. They applied their knowledge by developing the first ECOSTRESS-ENMAP-PRISMA evapotranspiration prototype. The prototype will be transformed into a decision support tool later this year for drought monitoring.
Such work is expected to inform upcoming ESA hyperspectral and thermal infrared missions: CHIME and LSTM.