The technical arm of the European Commission, the Joint Research Center (JRC), has trained fourteen African experts on how to use the environmental Station – dubbed the eStation – for producing land based GMES and Africa services in the Eastern, Southern, Northern and Western regions of Africa. The two-week training which started on February 18th, was held at the JRC campus in Ispra, Italy.
During the training, GMES and Africa experts were guided through the latest version of eStation software, structure and coding environment. They reviewed the existing products, chains and underlying processes as well as troubleshooting procedures and guidelines, whilst listing new data sets needed for the land services as well as the new chains associated with them. The training was also an experience sharing platform among GMES and Africa experts and experts from the JRC for the future development of eStations.
The workshop had parallel sessions on specific thematic topics from other JRC programs such as the eWater Platform, Food & Security, Soil & Development, and others. At the training, the European Space Agency (ESA) also introduced the Research and User Support (RUS) platform for sentinel core products as a new project, as well as to demonstrate the various benefits of using cloud computing for this type of data-heavy work.
Trainees were drawn from five of the lead consortia who had won the GMES and Africa grants to provide land-based services in their respective regions as well as officials from the African Union Commission. The lead consortia that attended the training were the Centre de Suivi Ecologique du Sénégal (CSE) based in Senegal (Western Africa); IGAD Climate Prediction and Application Centre (ICPAC) and the Regional Centre For Mapping Resource For Development (RCMRD), both based in Kenya (Eastern Africa); l’Observatoire du Sahara et du Sahel (OSS) based in Tunisia (Northern Africa); and the SADC Climate services Centre (SADC-CSC) based in Botswana (Southern Africa).
