Exploring Earth From Space: Lesotho – Small Country Surrounded Entirely by South Africa

Lesotho From Space

Credit score: Incorporates modified Copernicus Sentinel information (2020-21), processed by ESA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission takes us over northwest Lesotho – a small, land-locked nation surrounded fully by South Africa.

Recognized for its tall mountains and slim valleys, Lesotho is the one nation on the planet that lies utterly above 1000 m in elevation. Lesotho has an space of simply 30,000 sq km, across the identical dimension as Belgium, and has a inhabitants of round two million.

Round 80% of the nation’s inhabitants lives in rural areas and greater than three quarters of those persons are engaged in agriculture – principally conventional, rainfed cereal manufacturing and in depth animal grazing. The nation’s agricultural system faces a rising variety of points, together with a small portion of the land deemed arable, in addition to different climate-related vulnerabilities comparable to drought, floods, and excessive temperatures occurring extra incessantly.

This composite picture was created by combining three separate pictures from the near-infrared channel from the Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission over a interval of 9 months.

The primary picture, captured on November 27, 2020, is assigned to the crimson channel and represents the onset of the moist summer season season; the second from March 12, 2021, represents inexperienced, and was captured in direction of the tip of the moist season; and the third from August 19, 2021, covers the blue a part of the spectrum, captured throughout the brief, dry season.

All different colours seen within the picture are completely different mixtures of crimson, inexperienced, and blue, and differ in response to the stage of vegetation development. A definite sample emerges as a result of topographical variations on this mountainous panorama, comparable to altitude and slope, which affect native water availability.

Maseru, the capital and largest city middle of Lesotho, lies immediately on the Lesotho— South Africa border. The town is positioned on the left financial institution of the Caledon River, also called the Mohokare River, seen in black.

The Copernicus Sentinel-2 mission is designed to offer pictures that can be utilized to tell apart between completely different crop sorts in addition to information on quite a few plant indices, comparable to leaf space, leaf chlorophyll, and leaf water. The mission’s revisit time of simply 5 days, together with the mission’s vary of spectral bands, imply that modifications in plant well being and development could be extra simply monitored.

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