Drought Chile

Water accounting is a fundamental basis to understand water availability and demands and the related benefits and efficiencies are related to water uses. While the fundamental data needed for establishing water accounts is often missing, Remote Sensing can contribute to fill the data gaps. With this course PhD students and staff at ITT will become familiar with the application of Remote Sensing to derive information on precipitation, evapotranspiration and land cover - three essential information elements for water accounts. Dr. Raul Vicens from Universidade Federal Fluminense de Brasil will introduce the basic techinques of Remote Sensing using the software SPRING and introduce to derive land cover information from products such as Landsat. Dr. Mauricio Zambrano-Bigiarini from Universidad de la Frontera, Chile, will focus on the use of the R software to derive Precipitation estimates from products such as TRMM. Finally Dr Islam Sabry from the National Water Research Center, Egypt will introduce the use of satellite based estimates for evapotranspiration data.