The Full Picture

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countries – no more commercial motive, although the

Chinese and the Brazilians invested millions in devel-

oping this satellite. And there’s a big component of GEO

that are very proud of the fact that Africa is going to have

this free data. This is the first time that it’s been made

accessible from source.”

Bob Scholes was part of a teamwhich used satellite tech-

nology, high altitude research aircraft and ground-based

instruments to map the atmospheric circulation pattern

of southern Africa. The project was called ‘Safari’.

“It would not have been possible for any individual to

undertake this project”, explains Scholes. “But lots and

lots of people from different institutions, with different

observing capabilities, have played a part. Safari worked on

the principal that air circulation in Southern Africa is

united; united by the fact that a big high-pressure cell sits

over the whole sub-continent, for half of the year. So what

is produced as air-pollution in Mpumulanga doesn’t just

exit over the sea, but has an effect on what’s happening as

far away as Tanzania as well. And the smog seen in the

winter time in Gauteng is in fact partly caused by veld fires

in Angola.

“The Safari project puts all this together. By happy coin-

cidence it was an early application of the sensors on board

NASA’s Terra satellite which was launched in 2000, and

that’s where most of the funding came from. But Safari

really demonstrated the capability of putting together

many different elements – maps of soils and vegetation

together with field-collected information about the emis-

sions from individual leaves and fires – to the effects of

population distribution, to satellite observations in a lot

of different spheres. Putting all this together can answer

questions which are important either from the point of

view of policy or individuals. There is now a Southern

Africa policy group that works on trans-boundary pollu-

tion, and that came out of this initiative.”

Of course South Africa’s work on domestic and regional

earth observation is just a small part of a world-wide

attempt to more accurately map the earth, and so become

more aware of its foibles and idiosyncrasies, and conse-

quently make life on earth more predictable, enjoyable

and productive. To this end the country is engaged with

numerous multi-national bodies, most significantly, GEO,

whose present membership is now said to outnumber that

of the United Nations.

The future of earth observation in South Africa is an

exciting one. There are problems to be addressed: prob-

lems of awareness; of communicating to a wider audience

the potential of the capabilities of the various systems.

There are also problems of access, both in terms of

permissions, and in complications arising from non-

compatible computer programmes. But for people with

ideas, energy and imagination these are relatively simple

obstacles to overcome. The fact is that our ability to

observe the behaviour of our favourite planet, in the most

minute detail, has never been greater, and the challenge

is to use that ability to map out a better South Africa and

a better world. And South Africans have always been up

for this kind of challenge.

payers. Under South Africa’s (relatively new) Water Act, water is not

free. If rain falls on your farm, runs off into your dam and you pump

that water onto your land you are liable to pay an irrigation tax. A satel-

lite survey, using the infra-red band, in the Vaal catchment area, in 2001,

was able to determine differences between irrigated and non-irrigated

land according to erf number. When these statistics were compared to

the rates bills related to the same properties, it was evident that only 2

per cent of farmers were telling the truth about what they had registered

to irrigate when compared with what had actually been irrigated.

Many professional scientists working in the field of earth observa-

tion feel that we already have much of the information necessary to

propel our country forward into the next stages of its development.

However, they also deduce that the people most likely to be able to

make effective use of this information are either unaware of its exis-

tence, or are incapable of accessing it, or it is only available in a form,

which for all practical purposes, is unintelligible.

This is a problem. Bob Scholes, a senior scientist at the CSIR, and a

man who has spent many years in this field, says: “Suppose I want an

answer to a simple question. Is it going to rain next year, or isn’t it going

to rain? In response you send me a whole file of ones and zeroes; an

enormous file that I can’t open, and even if I did I wouldn’t understand

what ‘advective precipitation co-efficient’ means.

“This is one of the most important things the GEO partnership has

to deal with. You’ve got to make a connection between the guys who’re

counting the butterflies and the birds on the ground, and the guy in

the sky who’s got the picture of where to find the flowers. It could be

that there’s another patch of flowers over the hill. The two bits of infor-

mation independently are useless, but together they can answer the

question, ‘how do we connect the birds and the butterflies with the

flowers?’, and that’s what GEOS is all about.

“If I show you a picture, it doesn’t have any intrinsic value, that is to

say, no value in its own right. The real value comes when you can add

understanding to that; in other words the interpretation of it. And that

is in fact where you need to start assembling, in an integrated fashion,

a whole bunch of other information.”

So according to this prognosis, the main challenge ahead is not

putting more satellites into the sky, but making more people aware of

what already exists, and putting more resources into connectivity and

access.

“It must be understood that practically all this information is in the

public domain”, explains Bob Scholes. “It is quite evident that the only

way South Africa can benefit from this data is to share it, and this has

been recognized and agreed at cabinet level. Although my own impres-

sion is that news of this agreement has not yet reached all affected

parties, some of whom continue to treat the state’s information as their

own.

“To these people I repeat that it has been agreed by government that

information collected with public money, with rare exceptions, should

be accessible by any party who has a legitimate need for it. The excep-

tions are of course things like national security, but that’s a tiny fraction

of the data.”

There is a call to put in place national mechanisms to facilitate infor-

mation interchange, and the country’s increasing access to larger

bandwidths should encourage this movement. Most data already exists.

And in a surprising number of cases, it exists together with processes

designed to make it readily compatible with other systems.

Alex Fortescue, an expert on remote sensing, is particularly

delighted with South Africa’s access to the new Chinese/Brazilian

satellite. “It’s a question of developing countries helping developing

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