Sen-ET Introduction

Satellite remote sensing of evapotranspiration is an essential part of the global observation system and provides inputs for agriculture, water resources management, weather forecasts, climate studies and many other applications. Easy access to reliable estimations of Evapotranspiration (ET) is considered a key requirement within these domains, and ET holds a vast potential to assist in the current attempts of meeting several of the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), in particular SDG2 – zero hunger, SDG6 – clean water and sanitation and SDG13 – Climate action.

In this context, the European Space Agency (ESA) has funded the Sentinels for Evapotranspiration (Sen-ET) project. The main objective of Sen-ET was to develop an optimal methodology for estimating ET at fine (tens of meters) spatial scale, based on synergistic use of Sentinel 2 and Sentinel 3 satellites’ observations. The final methodology was implemented as an open source plugin to SNAP software and is available freely to all users.

The use of the developed method for national scale SDG monitoring will be demonstrated in a new project “Increasing Crop Water Use Efficiency At Multiple Scales Using Sentinel Evapotranspiration – ET4FAO ” funded through ESA’s EO for Society Open Call. Throughout ET4FAO further refinements to the Sen-ET method, as well as bug fixes, will be contributed back to Sen-ET GitHub repositories. For further details about ET4FAO project, see the news update.

For further details, go and see the Project page or contact the consortium.