ALBERT

Description: Monitoring of rainfall and vegetation over the continent of Africa is important for assessing the status of crop health and agriculture, along with longterm changes in land use change. These issues can be addressed through examination of longterm precipitation (rainfall) data sets and remote sensing of land surface vegetation and land use types. Two products have been used previously to address these goals: the Climate Hazard Group Infrared Precipitation with Stations (CHIRPS) rainfall data, and multiday composites of Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) from the USGS eMODIS product. Combined, these are very large data sets that require unique tools and architecture to facilitate a variety of data analysis methods or data exploration by the end user community. To address these needs, a webenabled system has been developed to allow endusers to interrogate CHIRPS rainfall and eMODIS NDVI data over the continent of Africa. The architecture allows endusers to use custom defined geometries, or the use of predefined political boundaries in their interrogation of the data. The massive amount of data interrogated by the system allows the endusers with only a web browser to extract vital information in order to investigate land use change and its causes. The system can be used to generate daily, monthly and yearly averages over a geographical area and range of dates of interest to the user. It also provides analysis of trends in precipitation or vegetation change for times of interest. The data provided back to the enduser is displayed in graphical form and can be exported for use in other, external tools. The development of this tool has significantly decreased the investment and requirements for endusers to use these two important datasets, while also allowing the flexibility to the enduser to limit the search to the area of interest.

Description: SERVIR is a joint project of NASA and US Agency for International Development (USAID). Mission is to use satellite data and geospatial technology to help developing countries manage resources, land use, and climate risks. Means to serve, in Spanish.