GIS & Remote Sensing for Water Management

Project Overview

The Gezira Irrigation Scheme is the world's largest contiguous irrigation project, spanning 8.4 million hectares in central Sudan. This project developed end-to-end workflows combining FAO WaPOR Level 2 and Level 3 products with multi-temporal Sentinel-2 imagery to produce seasonal water productivity assessments. Field-validated crop water requirement models were calibrated against ADCP discharge measurements and GPS-RTK survey benchmarks, ensuring rigorous ground-truth for all satellite-derived outputs.

Methodology

1. 01Multi-temporal Sentinel-2 NDVI and EVI time-series extraction at 10-meter resolution
2. 02WaPOR ETa, AETI, and Biomass product integration for water productivity calculation (WP = Y/ETa)
3. 03Object-Based Image Analysis (OBIA) for canal and field boundary delineation
4. 04Random Forest land-cover classification for seasonal crop mapping
5. 05Python (Rasterio, GeoPandas) automation of product generation and report outputs
6. 06QGIS dashboard integration for stakeholder reporting

Key Outputs

• Seasonal water productivity maps at administrative-office scale
• 5 technical monitoring reports delivered to HRC management
• Automated Python pipeline reducing processing time by 60%
• QGIS plugin (wapor-water-productivity) released as open source

Streamlined water productivity reporting for 8.4M ha irrigation system