Water Management & Productivity Assessment

Project Overview

The Gash Irrigation Scheme in eastern Sudan (Kassala State) is a spate irrigation system supporting ~300,000 smallholder farming households. This IFAD-funded project established a comprehensive water productivity baseline using the FAO Water Accounting Plus (WA+) framework combined with Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8 satellite imagery. WaPOR Level 1 and 2 products were downscaled to the scheme level and validated against seasonal flow records from the Gash River gauging network.

Methodology

1. 01FAO Water Accounting Plus (WA+) framework implementation for seasonal analysis
2. 02Sentinel-2 10 m and Landsat-8 30 m time-series analysis for crop extent mapping
3. 03WaPOR AETI spatial downscaling using regression-kriging with soil-moisture covariates
4. 04ArcGIS hydrological modeling for spate irrigation channel network delineation
5. 05ERDAS IMAGINE supervised maximum likelihood classification for land-cover baseline
6. 06FAO SEPAL platform cloud processing for large-area analysis

Key Outputs

• Complete water productivity baseline for ~300,000 ha spate scheme
• Seasonal water accounting reports in WA+ framework format
• Spatial map of low-productivity irrigation blocks for targeted intervention
• 3 training workshops delivered for local Gash Board technicians
• Technical report submitted to IFAD Project Coordination Unit

Completed water productivity baseline for ~300,000 ha scheme