The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission takes us over El Oued, in northeast Algeria, about 80 km west of the border with Tunisia.
Proven as a darkish elongated space within the heart of the picture, the city of El Oued lies round an oasis within the northern Sahara, in a area that’s in any other case an infinite sea of sand.
This false-color picture has been processed utilizing the mission’s near-infrared channel to show vegetation in pink, with irrigated vegetation proven in vivid pink and non-irrigated areas showing in darker pink tones. These vegetated areas stand out clearly within the surrounding gold sand dunes formed by the wind.
A lot of the agricultural fields within the picture are round, indicating that central-pivot irrigation programs are getting used. A properly, drilled within the heart of every circle, provides water to rotating sprinklers that spray water in a circular pattern. Every of the circles is round 100 m in diameter. The principle crops right here embody potatoes, onions and tomatoes.
Date palms are additionally crucial for the native economic system. They’re sometimes grown utilizing conventional strategies inside irregular funnel-shaped fields within the sand. They don’t should be irrigated often and will be noticed in darkish colours all through the picture, comparable to round El Oued and to the south of the city of Hassani Abdelkrim, northeast of El Oued.
Whereas offering detailed details about Earth’s vegetation, Copernicus Sentinel-2 performs a key position in mapping variations in land cowl to grasp how it’s used and to trace modifications over time, so helpful for monitoring desertification. The mission additionally gives measurements of water high quality and detects modifications in water bodies, supporting sustainable water administration—a useful software for arid areas the place water is scarce.
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European Space Agency
Quotation:
Earth from space: Farming the desert (2023, Could 5)
retrieved 5 Could 2023
from https://phys.org/information/2023-05-earth-space-farming.html
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