Full text: Proceedings of the Symposium on Global and Environmental Monitoring (Part 1)

Operational Environmental Satellite Remote Sensing 
for Food Security and Locust Control by FAO 
The ARTEMIS and DIANA Systems 
by 
Jelle U. Hielkema 
Senior Remote Sensing Officer (Environmental Monitoring) 
FAO Remote Sensing Centre 
Rome, Italy 
ABSTRACT 
Since 1976, the Remote Sensing Centre of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United 
Nations has, in cooperation with relevant FAO user divisions, actively been developing and testing the 
operational use of data from environmental and earth resources satellites for improving the information bases 
of the FAO Global Information and Early Warning System (GIEWS) on Food and Agriculture and Desert 
Locust Plague Prevention Programme at international, regional and national levels. This paper describes the 
operational satellite environmental monitoring system, ARTEMIS, implemented by FAO in 1988, in 
cooperation with NASA Goddard Space Right Centre (GSFC), the National Aerospace Laboratory (NLR) of 
the Netherlands and the Universities of Reading and Bristol (UK), for real/near realtime precipitation and 
vegetation assessment in Africa, the Near East and southwest Asia, based on the integrated use of high 
frequency Meteosat and NOAA AVHRR data. The paper furthermore summarizes the development status 
of the DIANA satellite telecommunication system of the European Space Agency (ESA). This system, which 
was formulated jointly by ESA and FAO, will permit near realtime transmission of high volume ARTEMIS 
digital data products to microcomputer based terminals of users at regional and national levels in Africa. 
1. Introduction 
Since 1975, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations has been pioneering the 
development of the use of satellite remote sensing techniques for improving the surveillance and forecasting 
capabilities of FAO’s Global Information and Early Warning System (GIEWS) on Food and Agriculture and 
Centralized Desert Locust Reporting and Forecasting Service at its Headquarters, as well as those of related 
organizations at the regional and national levels, primarily in Africa. 
On the basis of findings from experimental activities on the use of Landsat, NOAA and Meteosat satellite data 
for vegetation monitoring and precipitation assessment, FAO defined an operational system for largely 
automated satellite environmental monitoring for the above programmes, based on the use of hourly Meteosat 
thermal infrared and daily NOAA Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) data covering 
Africa, the Near-East and South-West Asia. The system, Agricultural Real Time Environmental Monitoring 
Information System (ARTEMIS) was developed as a result of close technical cooperation between the FAO 
Remote Sensing Centre, the FAO Global Information and Early Warning Service, Plant Protection Service, 
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), the Universities of Reading and Bristol and the National 
Aerospace Laboratory (NLR) of the Netherlands, with financial assistance from the Government of the 
Netherlands through an FAO Trust Fund. 
The ARTEMIS system was installed in the FAO Remote Sensing Centre in Rome during August 1988 and has 
since then operationally generated an increasing number of information products on the occurrence of rainfall 
and vegetation development, on a ten-day and monthly basis, which are currently being used by a number of 
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