Dr. Gabriel Senay is an agricultural engineer and remote sensing scientis at EROS. He specializes in monitoring agricultural water requirement, soil moisture and other crop performance indices derived from remotely sensed data. This monitoring is undertaken to assess agricultural crop performance and provide early warning of large-scale droughts. His crop monitoring products are used for decision-making in a wide variety of agencies including USAID, USDA, the World Food Program and the World Bank. He is currently involved in monitoring crop performance in Africa, Central America and South-East Asia and developing new algorithms for computing evapotranspiration from remotely sensed data. His efforts to make remote sensing technolgy applicable to small-scale farmers and other end-users have been recognized through several local and national awards. Dr. Senay has worked for the US EPA as a remote sensing scientist, developing a water quality mapping program in the monitoring of the "health" status of stream ecosystems using remotely sensed data and worked as a post-doctoral fellow at Oklahoma State University where he participated in the Southern Great Plains field experiment. He is a licensed professional engineer and obtained a B.S. in Agricultural Engineering from Alemaya University in Ethiopia, an M.S. in Hydrology from Wageningen University, The Netherlands and a Ph.D. in Agricultural Engineering from The Ohio State University.

Fig. 1. Part of an Africa-wide study on water harvest potential showing the required pond depth to maintain a net depth of 1m of water in one year after accounting for evaporation losses based on a daily water balance study.
Fig. 2. An operational Crop Water Requirement Satisfaction Index map depicting the crop performance status in Central America in 2004.