SMELLS will implement an innovative approach to combine Sentinel-1 SAR data with thermal disaggregated SMOS-derived soil moisture to derive a soil moisture product at both high-spatial and high-temporal resolution to provide a new tool for decision-makers in the Desert locust preventive control system.

Remote sensing tools developed so far for Desert locust preventive control focus on vegetation levels and particularly on Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and derived products. Recent works demonstrated the possibility to forecast locust presence based on these remote sensing data. However, using vegetation status can lead Desert locust managers to a problem of temporal scale of prediction to decide when to send survey teams. Indeed, NDVI or derived vegetation greenness maps might arrive to the managers in a temporal frame at the same time than locust populations actually develop. To be able to take earlier the decision to send survey teams, one solution is to have timely information about soil moisture, which precedes vegetation. Additionally, soil moisture is a very good indicator of reproduction potential of an area, since Desert locust females choose and need moist areas to lay their eggs. SMELLS will be a first attempt to include soil moisture information in the tools of Desert locust managers.

In this context, the main objectives of the project are:

  1. the establishment of a dialogue between developers and desert locust monitoring users about their requirements related to soil moisture remote sensing,
  2. the development of an innovative approach to derive high resolution Soil Moisture products from Sentinel-1 in synergy with SMOS data,
  3. assessing the capacity of Soil Moisture to predict locust presence to be used in the framework of Desert locust preventive management.

 

Five years of SMOS data were used to show how moisture in the soil changes with the seasons around the world. The animation illustrates how change according to season is pronounced in higher latitudes, but monsoon dynamics in the Indian subcontinent are also clearly visible. The ‘Sahel transition’ region in Africa is also well depicted. Seasonal flooding in regions such as La Plata in Argentina and the Orinoco Basin in Venezuela can also be seen.

Launched in November 2009, SMOS carries a novel radiometer to capture images of brightness temperature, which correspond to radiation emitted from Earth’s surface to produce maps of soil moisture and ocean salinity.