Chad and Central African Republic - November 19th, 2009
The Chari or Shari River, a 949-kilometer-long river of central Africa, flows from the Central African Republic (below) through Chad (above) in this FAPAR image. The watershed of the river covers 548,747 km².
FAPAR is an abbreviation for Fraction of Absorbed Photosynthetically Active Radiation, which provides information on the planet’s vegetation index. In such images, the color spectrum over land runs from red (1.0), to green, to yellow and white (0.0), while bodies of water appear blue.
This image shows that the land around the river and to its south, in the Central African Republic, is more photosynthetically active (green) than the land in Chad, which appears yellow to white as one moves northward towards the arid belt of the Sahel.
