Satellite rainfall monitoring over Africa for food security, using multi-channel MSG data

Near real-time rainfall estimates are crucial in sub-Saharan Africa for a variety of humanitarian and agricultural purposes. However, for economic and infrastructural reasons, regularly reporting rain-gauges are sparse and precipitation radar networks extremely rare. Satellite rainfall estimates, particularly from geostationary satellites such as Meteosat Second Generation (MSG), present one method of filling this information gap, as they produce data at high temporal and spatial resolution.