JRC trains GMES and Africa experts on how to use eStations for land services in Africa

The technical arm of the European Commission, the Joint Research Center (JRC), has trained African experts on how to use the environmental Station - dubbed the eStation - for producing land based GMES and Africa services in the Eastern, Southern, Northern and Western regions of Africa. 

This 2 times two-week training which started on Feb 18th to March 1st (Land-1) and continued from March 18th to March 29th (Land-2), was held at the JRC campus in Ispra, Italy.
During the training, GMES and Africa experts were guided through the latest version of eStation software, structure and coding environment. They reviewed the existing products, chains and underlying processes as well as troubleshooting procedures and guidelines, whilst listing new data sets needed for the land services as well as the new chains associated with them. The training was also an experience sharing platform among GMES and Africa experts and experts from the JRC for the future development of eStations. 

The participants in the Land 1 workshop

The workshop had parallel sessions on specific thematic topics from other JRC programs such as the eWater Platform, Food & Security, Soil & Development, and others. At the training, the European Space Agency (ESA) also introduced the Research and User Support (RUS) platform for sentinel core products as a new project, as well as to demonstrate the various benefits of using cloud computing for this type of data-heavy work. 

Two trainees were drawn from nine of the lead consortia who had won the GMES and Africa grants to provide land-based services in their respective regions as well as officials from the African Union Commission:

• Agence Gabonaise d’Etudes et d’Observations Spatiales (AGEOS) - based in Gabon (Central Africa);
• Centre de Suivi Ecologique du Sénégal (CSE) - Senegal (Western Africa);
• Centre for Space Science and Technology Education (CSSTE) - Nigeria (Eastern Africa)
• Commission Internationale du bassin Congo-Oubangui-Sangha (CICOS) - Democratic Republic of Congo (Eastern Africa);
• IGAD Climate Prediction and Application Centre (ICPAC) - Kenya (Eastern Africa);
• Observatoire du Sahara et du Sahel (OSS) - Tunisia (Northern Africa);
• Regional Centre For Mapping Resource For Development (RCMRD) - Kenya 'Easter Africa);
• SADC Climate services Centre (SADC-CSC) - Botswana (Southern Africa);
• Southern Africa Science Service Centre for Climate Change and Adaptive Land Management (SASSCAL) - Namibia (Southern Africa).

More info from the JRC (Land-2 Workshop):

• GMES & Africa Workshops for Service Design at the JRC
• The training content
• The above training (plus pictures of the training) is also available on google drive:
  https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1XFkFy8cYICdCaAiz9GG5X7xFXbn9Z_WC?usp=sharing

The participants in the Land 2 workshop