Effectiveness of high-resolution SAR for water resource management in low-income semi-arid countries

Abstract

This article presents an efficient framework and a sustainable pilot project on the effective use of spaceborne synthetic aperture radar (SAR) in low-income countries and semi-arid climatic contexts. The technical efficiency was pursued by integrating SAR models and hydrological assessment methods; the socio-economical sustainability was guaranteed by the joint work of scientists, technicians, and volunteers. The pilot project was developed in the Yatenga region, a Sahelian area in northern Burkina Faso. In particular, an original development of SAR interferometry algorithms was tailored to the peculiar climate, the soil characteristics, and the land cover of the semi-arid regions. A digital elevation model (DEM) was derived, and an original approach based on the use of SAR amplitude images is proposed for its validation. The achieved resolution (9 m) is significantly better than that of the previously available DEMs in the study area (30 m). Based on the DEM, the soil sedimentation rate of small reservoirs was estimated together with the average soil loss in the contributing catchments due to the erosion process. A multi-temporal filter was implemented on the SAR images for monitoring of water intake volume in small reservoirs, and its seasonal evolution. The developed tools provide an innovative contribution for the improvement of water resource management in the study area. This approach is repeatable and scalable to suit situations with similar economic and climatic condition

Rule-based land use/land cover classification in coastal areas using seasonal remote sensing imagery: a case study from Lianyungang City, China

“…Decision making on resource and environment management has been increasingly relying on geo-spatial information, such as land use/land cover (LULC) inventory, digital elevation model (DEM), and other environmental information (Mekasha et al 2014;Pauleit et al 2005;Amitrano et al 2014). In particular, LULC inventory provides a fundamental dataset to assess land resource abundance and environmental impact and to assist managers and policy makers in regional development (Gong et al 2011).…”

Sentinel-1 for Monitoring Reservoirs: A Performance Analysis

“…The availability of repeated acquisitions offered by new-generation sensors opens new perspectives for remote-sensing applications in semi-arid environments through the definition of new products which fully exploit the particular Sahelian climate [23]. In fact, as discussed in [19], the occurrence of a condition of aridity of the scene at the peak of the dry season makes it possible to establish a reference scenario for the other available images.…”

“…In Figure 4, we show the DEMs with different water levels that were given as input to the simulator. It is worthwhile to note that with respect to the DEM presented in [23], a local adaptive filter (see [35]) has been applied in order to reduce the noise due to the presence of vegetation on the boundary of the water surface. A vertical stretching factor has been applied for visualization purposes.…”

“…In [23], a reliable DEM was extracted by means of an interferometric processing of two images acquired at the end of the dry season, when the interferometric coherence is expected to be sufficiently high. The resolution of the DEM (9 m, obtained by the 3-multilook of the 3 m input SAR data) is significantly higher with respect to those previously available: SRTM (resolution 90 m) and ASTER (resolution 30 m).…”

RGB SAR products: methods and applications

“…It is characterized by two seasons: a dry season and a wet season [Amitrano et al, 2014]. During the dry season, the environment is almost completely dry and the vegetation reaches its minimum.…”