ESA EO Africa R&D Facility: The Space Academy

The Space Academy of the AFRICA R&D Facility is the virtual Institute in charge of the development, delivering and certification of all the Capacity Development activities. It provides a comprehensive program of EO and Cloud Computing-based training to tackle the current challenges related to water and food security in Africa.  This material is also intended to be incorporated at African universities to strengthen curricula in EO.  

The topics included in the Space Academy have been primarily defined according to the requirements of the EO African community and the EO AFRICA Research Projects.  

There are 6 categories of training as described below

1. Face to Face Courses

These are 5-day courses: day1: general intro EO AFRICA, cloud computing, use of Jupyter notebooks and EO data access. Day 2, 3 and 4 is dedicated to applications and Day 5 is dedicated to presentations by trainees on their achievements 

*Due to the COVID-19 situation, the first F2F course was held on-line in the form of live sessions.

Advances in Earth Observation (online/F2F)	Earth Observations for Water Resources Monitoring and Management	Cloud Computing and Algorithms for EO Analyses
Mapping and Performance Monitoring of Agroecosystems from Space	Cloud based EO analyses for Water and Food Security	Vegetation and Drought Monitoring from Space

2. Online courses

A set of webinars, presentation, small exercises and case studies. Approximately 40 studying hours, spread out in a period of one month.

Cloud Computing and Algorithms for EO Analyses	Principles of and advances in Earth Observation
Water and Energy budgets from Space	Vegetation and Drought monitoring from Space
UPCOMING
Hyper-Temporal Mapping of Agro-Ecosystems & Assessing Land Suitability	Soil Moisture from Space

3. Webinars

Also available at the EO AFRICA R&D Facility YouTube Channel 

Introduction to Cloud Computing for EO Analyses	Access to Earth Observation		Software Tools for Earth Observation analyses (SNAP, QGIS)		Evapotranspiration from space: methodology and products
Introduction to Precipitation from Space		Hyper-Temporal Mapping of Agro-Ecological Systems		Flood Mapping with Sentinel-1 data

4. MOOC

Drought Assessment and Monitoring from Space

 1st  run:  Nov 2021 to Nov 22.

 2nd run: Jan 2023 – Jan 2024 (with updated webinars and additional material)

Topics MOOC overview              Vegetation and Drought Monitoring from Space Copernicus Programme, Sentinel satellites – EO for Africa            Jupyter notebooks and cloud computing EO software tools           EO based information for vegetation and drought monitoring Observing the water cycle from space Monitoring vegetation dynamics from space ET from space Soil moisture dynamics from space Crop Monitoring and Yield estimation from space    EO AFRICA R&D Facility

5. Training Modules

The modules are intended to be used at African Universities (MSc level) curricula in the field of EO for water and food security. All packages use free and open-software. (also available for downloading at the GMES and Africa portal)

Principles of and advances in EO (optical and SAR) Cloud Computing for EO Analyses Water and Energy budgets from EO Soil Moisture from Space Monitoring small water bodies and floods using Sentinel-1/-2 satellites Vegetation and Drought Monitoring from Space Mapping and Monitoring Ecological Systems; Assessing Land Suitability Crop Monitoring and Yield Estimation from Space

Links

• The Space Academy 
• The AFRICA R&D Facility

More details

Dr. Diana Chavarro-Rincon

Senior Project Officer Department of Water Resources

Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) - University of Twente 

e-mail: d.c.chavarrorincon[at]utwente.nl

Website:  https://www.itc.nl/