Malta has a semi-arid Mediterranean climate with a low availability of natural renewable water resources for sustaining the production of drinking water, the water demand of agriculture and the sustainability of the environment. This coupled to a high population density exerts a significant pressure on natural water resources and associated ecosystems. The overall objective of the WARM-EO project is to develop a Water Resource Management platform that can be used to estimate irrigation water consumption of particular crops at country level. Nevertheless, models adopted in other countries are not applicable to small Mediterranean countries such as Malta where the parcels are too small and fragmented for the resolution of existing open-access satellite services. The WARM-EO project aims to develop a cost-effective high-resolution evapotranspiration model to estimate the irrigation water use at parcel level. More specifically, the project aims to develop a deep-learning based multi-frame superresolution algorithm to improve the resolution of Sentinel-2 optical images to enable the computation of vegetation indices at 3 m resolution. Moreover, this project intends to fuse in-situ data obtained from nine farms scattered around the island and remote sensing data to estimate land surface temperature at parcel level. The resulting high-resolution evapotranspiration model will be validated against ground-truth evapotranspiration measurements provided by the Energy and Water Agency as part of the CF.PA 10.0096 Project. A Web-GIS service will also be developed to estimate the evapotranspiration of the whole country. The project WARM-EO is financed by the Malta Council for Science & Technology, for and on behalf of the Foundation for Science and Technology, through the National Space Research Fund Programme.

Duration:  2020-2022

Grant:  €150,000