The Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD) and IGAD Climate Prediction and Applications Centre (ICPAC) within the framework of the Monitoring for Environment and Security in Africa (MESA) is holding a two-week thematic training for forest monitoring and land degradation assessment. In this context,

participants from 10 countries including the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) member States and Rwanda and Burundi have been given the opportunity to process Sentinel 2 data for their own regions.

The Sentinel 2 satellite mission is jointly implemented by the European Commission (EC) and European Space Agency (ESA) and provides data at 10m and 20m for land cover mapping in different spectral channels, 13 in all. It currently has a revisit period of 10 days. When Sentinel 2 satellite will be joined by Sentinel 2b in 2017, the revisit period will be every 5 days.

Sentinel 2 images of Sudan being processing in the JRC IMPACT tool.

The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC), with whom RCMRD has a long standing cooperation and a Memorandum of Understanding, provided the technical support to process the data. JRC provided training on their open-source image processing software, IMPACT. The software, originally designed to provide a rapid processing of Landsat data, has been modified to process Sentinel 2 data from the raw data files provided on the ESA web site, through to classified images, which can be used in GIS. Given the restrictions of data download in a number of countries, Sentinel data is difficult to access, with data files of close to 6 Gb. JRC aims to set up an online user interface where partner countries can select images and order a ‘light’ version so as to reduce downloading time. The interface will contain data held both at JRC and RCMRD.