MARKETBASAR

Bangladesh is each year affected by monsoon floods. These floods which occur mostly during June to October are caused by a combination of factors such as rainfall in the upper catchment of rivers in India and Nepal, in-country local rainfall, snow melting in the Himalayas and impacts of above-normal tide in the Bay of Bengal. Floods are essential for maintaining the floodplain system and making agricultural production and fishery possible. However extreme floods cause also enormous socio-economic damages in terms of loss of life, crops, livestock and property.

Rice production is still much controlled by weather conditions as production is closely linked to water availability. Normal floods enlarge freshwater fishery resources and provide the farmers with water for the crops. The timing of the onset of flooding, its peak, its duration and recession often determine the planting time of the dominant monsoon crop.

In Bangladesh, during the last decade several initiatives have been set up to monitor the flood process by using geographical information. These activities have led to a geographical knowledge centre in Dhaka now known as EGIS. Under a former ESA DUP funding project, a transportable ground receiving station was temporarily installed in Bangladesh in 1999. During the monsoon several SAR images were acquired and successfully processed in near real time for flood applications. Based on this experience the need arose for an extension of the project to look more into agricultural applications and making the link to the flood applications from a business point of view rather than from an R&D point of view.

The Marketbasar project had the following objectives:

• To establish a long-term plan on providing satellite derived information products for the agricultural and flood sector in Bangladesh, based on the experiences of Synoptics, Resource Analysis and EGIS.
   
• To prepare for the use of ENVISAT and RADARSAT-2 data.