SCATMALI

The overall objective of the SCATMALI project was first to develop a service demonstrator for drought early warning in Mali based on ERS Wind Scatterometer information, and second to run and evaluate the demonstrator during the growing season of 1998 in Mali.

A number of tasks have been performed:

• adapt and develop suitable concepts to retrieve soil moisture information from ERS-scatterometer data over Mali;
• use these remotely sensed soil moisture measurements as crop performance indicators for various soils and crops;
• validate, demonstrate and evaluate these indicators in Mali

The project was performed in two phases.

In the first phase, historical data were collected and processed for scatterometer observations in the period 1991 to 1997. Historical rainfall data were processed for 13 stations with records over the past 47 to 75 years, and a soil and crop database was established for Mali. Rainfall based and rainfall-evaporation based water balance simulations were compared to scatterometer derived soil moisture and scatterometer-based water balances over 5 years. Crop planting and crop performance indicators were developed utilising the scatterometer derived soil moisture data.

In the second phase all scatterometer measurements were collected during the growing season of 1998. Weekly averages were calculated. At the end of every week these data were communicated to Mali and published on the Internet. A field campaign was conducted for 6 locations on different moments during the season. Another extensive survey amongst people involved in agriculture in different ways, has led to a very large database with crop and cropping information.