Use of high-resolution SAR data for the monitoring of water resources in Burkina Faso

The integrated management of water resources is a crucial problem for improving the quality of life in Sub-Saharian Africa. Several satellites everyday acquire a huge amount of physical information that could be employed as a support for solving agriculture and water problems. In this paper we present a project devoted to exploit the use of high resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images for water resource management at no cost for the users. A case study is developed in the Yatenga region, in the northern Burkina Faso, integrating hydrologic and remote sensing models in order to improve the capacity of predicting flood and drought events. Main attention is posed here on the innovative fractal techniques developed for the extraction of geometrical and physical parameters that can be used for calibrating hydro-geological models.