Drought and Flood Mitigation Service (DFMS) droughts and poor rainy seasons as well as having to
deal with heavy downpours causing flooding of their
lands. The intensity and length of the dry seasons as
well as the timing and intensity of the rainy seasons
are becoming more and more unpredictable.
Although improvements in weather forecasting are
being made, the situation in Uganda is that reliable
and actionable weather and crop data are still often
not available and of varying quality, contributing
to underperforming agricultural production and
food insecurity. Whilst in the coming years capacity
building to achieve a truly sustainable solution will
continue, DFMS will provide Uganda’s decisionmakers
access to reliable and actionable information
now.
DFMS is a suite of information products that enables
its Users to take better-informed water, environmental,
and agricultural management decisions and,
amongst others, mitigate the impacts of drought and
floods. Access to DFMS only requires an Internetconnected
device. Information is provided as maps
or in graphs and tables, and several analysis tools
allow for bespoke data processing and visualisation.
Alarms can be tailored to indicate when parameters
exceed user-defined thresholds.
Creating DFMS required the development of a
(software) platform to process data and visualise
the resulting information; environmental data going
into the platform and algorithms for processing;
and a computing infrastructure (servers) to host the
platform and provide the service. The DFMS Platform
is built using Open Source software, including Open
Data Cube technology for storing and analysing
Earth Observation data. It extensively uses (free)
satellite remote sensing data, but also takes in data
gathered in situ. By making the platform scalable
and replicable, DFMS can be extended to contain
additional Products or be rolled out in other countries
in the region and beyond. This project aims to provide accurate flood and drought predictions to farmers in Uganda so that they are able to use that information to adjust their farming and livestock activities, with the ultimate impact of reducing the losses they would otherwise suffer from flood and drought impacts. The system is enabled through use of data with improved quality, detail and frequency from the Sentinel 1, 2 and 3 satellites (to ensure low cost) combined with SMOS/SMAP and climate modelling/meteorological data.