OPERATIONAL USE OF ENVIRONMENTAL SATELLITE REMOTE-SENSING AND SATELLITE-COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY FOR GLOBAL FOOD SECURITY AND LOCUST CONTROL BY FAO - THE ARTEMIS AND DIANA SYSTEMS

Since August 1988, after a development period of 3 years, the FAO Remote Sensing Centre has been operating the Africa Real Time Environmental Monitoring Information System (ARTEMIS) in support of the Global Information and Early Warning System on Food and Agriculture and the Desert Locust Plague Prevention Programme of FAG. The ARTEMIS system was implemented by FAO in close co-operation with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, U.S.A.; the National Aerospace Laboratory of The Netherlands and the University of Reading, U.K. ARTEMIS is a highly automated data acquisition, pre and thematic processing, production and archiving system for real-time precipitation assessment and near real-time vegetation condition monitoring of Africa, the Near East and Southwest Asia, based on hourly Meteosat thermal infrared and NOAA AVHRR data. The vegetation condition assessment capability is currently being expanded to include the rest of Asia and Latin America. ARTEMIS data products, generated by the system on a 10-day amd monthly basis, are currently used operationally by a variety of users at FAO Headquarters and by regional and national food security early warning systems in sixteen Eastern and Southern African countries. The ARTEMIS system plays an important role in the generation and archiving of global satellite derived environmental data sets for use by FAO and other organizations with global monitoring and assessment mandates. An extensive ARTEMIS rainfall estimation calibration programme, covering Sahelian countries as well as Eastern Southern Africa, has been developed in co-operation with the University of Reading, U.K. and regional FAO field projects. This programme was started in 1990 and will continue through 1995 to obtain statistically valid regression parameters for homogeneous climatic zones to allow automated translation of satellite derived cold cloud duration data into quantities of estimated rainfall. Jointly with the European Space Agency, FAO Has been implementing during 1989-1992 a dedicated satellite communications system, DIANA (Direct Information Access Network for Africa), which allows real-time transmission of high volume ARTEMIS digital products to user terminals in Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana and Harare, Zimbabwe. The DIANA system, which operates through the Intelsat satellite over the Indian Ocean and the italian Intelsat groundstation of Telespazio in Fucino, is currently being tested and demonstrated for a wide variety of applications of an operational, technical and administrative nature.