This paper provides a case study from the northern Senegal wetlands documenting trends in inter-annual and seasonal climate variability during the past century as well as human vulnerability and adaptation to anomalous climate events. A secular decline in precipitation during the past 3 decades has resulted in the construction of 2 dams on the Senegal River in the 1980s and an interstate river basin development strategy to develop hydroelectricity, irrigation farming, and a navigable waterway. Current agro-ecological production systems dependent on a seasonal riparian flood cycle could be curtailed in trying to meet these development objectives. Two hydrological time flow series illustrating the importance of inter-annual and seasonal climate variability for the region are used to weigh the costs and benefits of competing water use scenarios for end users.
Research activities aiming at integrating Earth Observation data in large scale distributed hydrological modelling will be presented. The focus will be on the Senegal River basin in West Africa where satellite data from various sensors and from different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum will be used in combination with a distributed model specifically adapted to utilize Earth Observation data. The work represents the initial results obtained by the ongoing INTEO project. The outcome and experiences gained so far are primarily related to low resolution optical data from the NOAA-AVHRR sensor, and results related to land cover classification, vegetation and soil moisture will be presented.By the end of 1996 the Danish Research Council had launched a four-year research programme in Earth Observation (EO) with the long-term purpose of complementing and developing ongoing earth observation activities in Denmark. INTEO (INTegration of Earth Observation data in agrohydrological models) was one of the four projects that obtained funding through this initiative. This multi disciplinary project has the ultimate objective to integrate EO data and hydrological models with the perspective of improving water resource management. Research within INTEO focuses on the use of satellite remote sensing data combined with large scale hydrological modelling, in particular the Senegal River basin in West Africa, (Figure 1). This paper presents the research done within INTEO, with focus on the general approach pursued for combining
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.