TEMBO Africa: New sensors and geo-services for water management and agriculture

TEMBO Africa is a project funded by the European Commission that seeks to fill some of the many geo-data gaps in Africa. Specifically, TEMBO Africa will produce operational data products for rainfall, river flow, soil moisture, bathymetry, and open water. With these products, new services will be developed for reservoir management, germination insurance, and flood early warnings. The products will be the result of the combination of innovative in situ sensors, satellite observations, and environmental models. There will be at least seven innovative in situ sensing methods involved, namely X-band rainfall radars, neutron counting for soil moisture based on natural boron, commercial microwave links, camera-based velocimetry, bathymetry with fish finders, raindrop intervalometers, and GNSS level sensors. TEMBO Africa is transformative in that it aims to reduce the total costs of ownership of the geo-services to less than 10% of present costs. We do not only look at the capital costs of the sensors but also at reduction of maintenance cost and the availability and development of human resources. For this reason, co-development is essential to ensure that context specific challenges are addressed. In this presentation, we highlight the general design approach and early results.

The work leading to these results has received funding from the European Horizon Europe Programme (2021-2027) under grant agreement n° 101086209. The opinions expressed in the document are of the authors only and no way reflect the European Commission’s opinions. The European Union is not liable for any use that may be made of the information.

    TEMBO Africa