A generally wet 2024 rainy season is expected over the Sahelian strip, with late to average onset dates in the Central Sahel and early to average in the Western and Eastern Sahel, late to average cessationdates, short dry spells at the beginning of the season in the Western Sahel and average to long dry spells in the Eastern Sahel and overall long towards the end of the season across the entire strip Sahelian region, and overall above-average flows in the main river basins of the Sahel.
This paper presents the first attempt to include soil moisture information from remote sensing in the tools available to desert locust managers. The soil moisture requirements were first assessed with the users. The main objectives of this paper are: i) to describe and validate the algorithms used to produce a soil moisture dataset at 1 km resolution relevant to desert locust management based on DisPATCh methodology applied to SMOS and ii) the development of an innovative approach to derive high-resolution (100 m) soil moisture products from Sentinel-1 in synergy with SMOS data. For the purpose of soil moisture validation, 4 soil moisture stations where installed in desert areas (one in each user country). The soil moisture 1 km product was thoroughly validated and its accuracy is amongst the best available soil moisture products. Current comparison with in-situ soil moisture stations shows good values of correlation (R > 0.7) and low RMSE (below 0.04m3 m−3). The low number of acquisitions on wet dates has limited the development of the soil moisture 100m product over the Users Areas. The Soil Moisture product at 1 km will be integrated into the national and global Desert Locust early warning systems in national locust centres and at DLIS-FAO, respectively.
