ABOUT

Background

ESA's EO AFRICA Research and Development framework aims at building a solid African-European collaboration, enabling an active research community and creative innovation processes for a continuous development and adoption of EO capabilities in Africa.
The framework does so by focusing on capacity building and setting up different types of joint research projects between European and African research institutes. 
ARIES is one of the EOAfrica EXPLORERS projects, a series of dedicated research projects launched to develop new and innovative algorithms/EO data services specifically tackling current socio-economic and/or environmental problems on the African continent. 
Within ARIES, we specifically focus on algorithm development related to agricultural water management and food security.

Droughts are considered the most relevant hazard in terms of economic losses in many areas around the globe, and particularly on the African continent.
In order to create resilient and productive agricultural systems, there is a clear need for efficient tools to monitor and predict (1) the occurence of droughts and (2) their impact on agricultural productivity.

Both hyperspectral and thermal satellite imagery can potentially play an important role for high-resolution drought monitoring. Research on their potential contribution is however limited due to the current lack of such high spatial and temporal resolution datasets. In the coming decade, ESA is planning to launch two new operational Sentinel missions (CHIME and LSTM) to tackle this data gap. In the meantime, several precursor missions (PRISMA and EnMAP for hyperspectral and ECOSTRESS for thermal data) have arisen to enable active research in the potential role of these future missions for various land monitoring applications.