Satellites aid food security in Afghanistan
Drought affects nearly all of Afghanistan. High chronic food insecurity is indicated by green, long term drought by brown, and household food deficits and severe water shortages by orange. (FEWS.net)
Afghan farmers get most of their water from melting snow. But reservoirs and canals designed to hold snowmelt have suffered from decades of conflict. There’s snow in the mountains, but how do you find out how much?
Mike Budde and his colleagues use satellites to monitor water available for food crops in Afghanistan. They’re part of the Famine Early Warning System Network.
Afghan farmers get most of their water not from rain, but from melting snow. In Afghanistan, the reservoirs designed to hold snowmelt have suffered from decades of conflict. There’s snow in the mountains, but how much? It’s important to know, so farmers can plan, based on how much water will become available each year as the snow melts.
But how do you monitor mountain snow in a place with an extreme climate and hazardous roads, a place where conflict and violence are common?
Mike Budde: You can obviously understand that getting out to the field and assessing things firsthand is a difficult prospect there, so we rely very much on remotely sensed information.
Satellite images, combined with data about things like air temperature, allow scientists to estimate how much water is available each year.
That information is reported to the Afghan government and other relief organizations. Again, Mike Budde.
Mike Budde: I think a big frustration is the fact that you’re limited in being only able to provide the information and not necessarily know if that’s being used to create good results or not.
Thanks today to NASA: explore, discover, understand.
Famine Early Warning System Network
Our thanks to:
Michael E. Budde
Environmental Scientist
SAIC Technical Support Services at USGS/EROS
Sioux Falls, SD
Additional Teacher Resources
FEWS NET: Food Security Status Alerts and Headlines
FEWS NET (Famine Early Warning Systems Network) is a USAID-funded activity that collaborates with international, national, and regional partners to provide early warning and vulnerability information on emerging food security issues. Information on food security alerts in countries around the world is provided, as well as interactive monitoring tools.
NASA: NASA Researchers Find Satellite Data Can Warn of Famine
This article describes the work of a NASA researcher who has developed a new method to anticipate food shortages brought on by drought. The researcher and her colleagues created a model using data from satellite remote sensing of crop growth and food prices. They believe that information provided by this new technique can aid organizations that are part of the U.S. Agency for International Developments (USAID) Famine Early Warning System to stem suffering that occurs every year from food crises.
