The second continental environmental bulletin on the vegetation, rainfall and fire status in Africa for the months of May to August 2011 is issued as an outcome of the 2nd AMESD Continentalization Workshop. The workshop took place from August 29 to September 2, 2011 in the AMESD Headquarters, at the African Union Commission in Addis Ababa. It gathered AMESD Team Leader and representatives of four AMESD Regional Implementation Centres, namely BDMS (Gaborone), CICOS (Kinshasa), and ICPAC (Nairobi). A representative of the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Union was also among the participants of the workshop.

The bulletin produced a status of vegetation development, rainfall and fire activities at the scale of the African continent. It outlined regions where anomalies of the current vegetation season took place. In this bulletin, regions of severe drought, short-term dryness, high rainfall, and above average rainfall were accurately delimited.

The analysis was made jointly by the group during the workshop using the eStation installed at the African Union Commission. The eStation, developed by JRC, equips the AMESD satellite receiving stations deployed in each of the 47 sub-Saharan African countries, and is therefore an adequate tool to share processing methods throughout the continent.  On the eStation, rapid and efficient analysis of the current situation of rainfall and vegetation condition compared to 10-15 years averages can be done on a pixel basis.

In the first environmental bulletin, which was issued in May 2011, an example of eStation output is shown, for a point located in Somalia, where it can easily be seen that the current vegetation season is dramatically sub-normal and affected by drought. Rapid accumulation of such graphs throughout Africa permits to provide a status of the situation in the continent.

Delimitations of affected areas at continental scale are highly important for sound decision making in the continent. The bulletins are so far conceived as demonstrators for the future implementation of regular continental bulletins produced operationally in the framework of the successor project of AMESD, the MESA project (Monitoring of the Environment and Security in Africa).

The environmental bulletins can be downloaded here.