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Project at a Glimpse

With evidence from recent studies that the region is witnessing the worst drought in several hundred years, water use management is a key concern for Lebanon and quantification of water requirements is important to the agricultural sector of the country. In regions where water availability is an increasingly limiting factor, solutions must include increasing water use efficiency in crop production and moving toward more sustainable and climate-resilient agri-ecosystems.

Our project aims at fusing information from multiple remote sensing missions covering a range of spatial and temporal resolutions. We  synthesize information and produce water use data approximating the required level of detail. We also aim at making this data available to end-users by developing an online platform and a smartphone application. The ultimate goal in this project is to map daily water use, daily vegetation indices, and eventually yield and water productivity in the context of a field-scale agricultural monitoring system for improved water.

Project Goals

  1. Provide field-scale water use for the public
  2. Guide farmers to improve irrigation at the field level
  3. Provide a tool for managing water deliveries and allocations at the district level
  4. Develop a smart-phone application available to the public for accessing the generated ET data
  5. Widely disseminate the application via conducting training for stakeholders (farmers, engineers at various water authorities and ministries, youth, decision makers, high-level stakeholders)

Project Outputs

Thematic areas

Efficient water management, particularly in the agricultural sector

Data and tools generated from this project

A mobile application for the WAPOR database

Daily high resolution ET maps for 2015-2016 for Lebanon, fusing multiple satellite imagery. Data will be periodically uploaded to this site.

Geographical area of proposed research

 The country of Lebanon, with focus on Orontes and Litani Basins

Project Lead

The project is lead by the Principal Investigator, Dr. Hadi Jaafar, an Assistant Professor of Irrigation Engineering and Water Management.

Dr. Jaafar specializes in water resources and GIS and remote sensing applications in smart irrigation and food security. His research work appears in journals like Nature’s Scientific Data, Remote Sensing of the Environment, Journal of Hydrology, Agricultural Water Management, Food Policy, among many others.

AUB Profile : https://www.aub.edu.lb/pages/profile.aspx?memberID=hj01

Profile: https://sites.aub.edu.lb/drhadijaafar/

Email: hj01@aub.edu.lb

Twitter: @HadiHJaafar

Donors and Partners

Ministry of Foreign Affairs Netherlands

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is the channel through which the Dutch Government communicates with foreign governments and international organisations.

IHE DELFT

IHE Delft Institute for Water Education is the largest international graduate water education facility in the world and is based in Delft, the Netherlands. The Institute confers fully accredited MSc degrees, and PhD degrees in collaboration with partner universities.

Acknowledgments

This research project is supported by the Programmatic Cooperation between the Directorate-General for International Cooperation (DGIS) of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs and IHE Delft in the period 2016 – 2020, also called DUPC2.

About this site

This is the website for the DUPC2 funded project: Integrating time series ET mapping into an operational irrigation management framework (ITSET)

phone: 01350000/4570
email: hj01@aub.edu.lb