Section: Mini projects for the classroom phase | GMES&Africa and Copernicus Marine Earth Observation Training Course, Zanzibar, 2019 | EUMETSAT

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  • GMES & Africa and Copernicus Marine Earth Observation

    This is the online phase for the GMES&Africa and Copernicus Marine Earth Observation Training Course. 

    This training is co-organised by the MarCoSouth GMES&Africa consortia and EUMETSAT in collaboration with other GMES&Africa partners and guest lecturers.

    The MarCOSouth project aims to maintain, further develop and provide a sustainable platform for local, institutional, human and technical capabilities in the African countries  through the development of services focused on sustainable socio-economic development, empowering a wide range of users in the public and private sectors through the application of regionally-optimised satellite observations and model based forecasts in African marine and coastal domains.

    Through Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) and Africa, the Africa Marine and Coastal Operations projects will contribute to the implementation of the African Space Policy and Strategy (ASPS) through application of world-leading satellite sensors, e.g. the European Sentinel series, with innovative and regionally optimised products. Examples of ASPS objectives addressed are: developing indigenous infrastructure and capabilities that service an African market; provisioning regionally appropriate services and products; ensuring all levels of government are able to access data through a centralised portal.

    The goal of this workshop is to strengthen your capacities to develop Earth Observation products, services and tools that promote sustainable management of marine resources, improve marine governance, and stimulate the growth of the blue economy in Africa..The online phase will introduce you to the Copernicus Marine Data Stream (CMDS), providing you with the background knowledge of the Copernicus programme, satellites and instrumentation, data access and formats, tools and software, necessary to begin working with this data for marine applications .The aims of this training course (both the online and classroom phases) are to help you:

    • Understand the concepts around Earth Observation across the value chain;
    • Learn the underlying principals of marine remote sensing, how to access / download data and products, and how to work with various open source tools; 
    • Develop and deliver a 'mini project' so you are able to gain all the skills that are directly applicable to your research / work needs.
    This online phase will be followed by a classroom phase in Zanzibar, Tanzania from the 12th - 20th November (applications are closed).

     

Mini projects for the classroom phase

  • Mini projects for the classroom phase

    During the classroom phase of this training course, you will be given to opportunity to work with data from Sentinel-1, 2 and 3 and the Copernicus services in ways aligned with your own research interests and planned future uses of the data. Members of the training team will be present to help with questions about the data and software, and provide feedback for you. 

    We would like you to suggest a small project that you would like to work on during these few days. At the end of the course you will be asked to present a short summary on what you have done, your experiences working with the data and future plans. You are free to work together with other participants if this suits you. We have provided some ideas below for those of you who are new to the use of marine satellite data.

    We will discuss the concepts of the satellite data value chain during the classroom phase, however, towards the aims of GMES&Africa and Earth Observation service development, you may wish to consider the following:

    •     Who are the users/audience?  (e.g. artisinal fishermen, government, scientists, etc.)
    •     What are their information needs?  (e.g. greatest value in data quality or data latency)
    •     What products (if any) do they have access to, and can these be improved upon?
    •     What value can you add to standard satellite products?

    To complete this section, please post in the discussion forum below about your ideas for a mini project. You should state: your region and topic of interest, and the particular type(s) of data you would like to work with.

    If you need some inspiration, you can look at the mini project ideas page below, and/or some recent case studies using Copernicus data:

    • For Sentinel-3 data from EUMETSAT, here
    • For Copernicus Marine Environmental Monitoring Service data, here