Space agency Projects
St3TART: Sentinel-3 Topography mission Assessment through Reference Techniques
The Copernicus Sentinel-3 Surface Topography Mission (STM) provides extremely valuable surface elevation information over inland waters, sea ice and land ice, thanks to its SAR altimeter which retrieves high-resolution along-track elevation measurements, and to its orbit that covers high-latitude polar regions.
To ensure that these measurements can be used with confidence, and to maximize the return on investment of the Copernicus Sentinel-3 ...
STREAM: SaTellite based Runoff Evaluation And Mapping
Water is at the centre of economic and social development; it is vital to maintain health, grow food, manage the environment, and create jobs. As well over half of the world’s potable water supply is extracted from rivers, either directly or from reservoirs, understanding the variability of the stored water on and below landmasses, i.e., total runoff, is of primary importance. In situ observations or land surface/hydrological models are ...
RIDESAT: Monitoraggio fluviale da rilevamento satellitare
Although representing less than 1% of the total amount of water on Earth, the freshwater is essential for terrestrial life and human needs. Despite the existing in-situ gauging networks represent a tool for quantifying the instantaneous water volume in many river channels, we have surprisingly poor knowledge of the spatial and temporal dynamics of surface river discharge. Developing new procedures for river discharge estimation based on ...
SMOS+RAINFALL II: SMOS+RAINFALL II
Quantitative information about precipitation is one vital input to meteorologists, hydrologic scientists, water resources managers, and environmental legislators. The past SMOS+Rainfall project addressed the improvement on a global scale of the current state-of-the-art satellite rainfall products through satellite soil moisture observations derived from the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity mission (SMOS) by means of three different techniques. ...
GLOBAL SM2RAIN: A new independent GLOBAL rainfall product from ASCAT soil moisture observations through SM2RAIN
Accurate rainfall estimates are of paramount importance as rainfall plays a key-role in many fields as, to cite a few, natural hazard assessment (floods and landslides), drought management, weather forecasting, agriculture and diseases prevention. State-of-the-art rainfall products obtained by satellites are often the only way for measuring rainfall in remote areas of the ...
WACMOS-Irrigation: STSE Water Cycle Multi-mission Observation Strategy – Irrigation
Irrigation is one of the greatest human intervention in the hydrological cycle. The knowledge of the distribution, the extent of irrigated areas and the amount of water used by irrigation is needed for different purposes: 1) modelling irrigation water requirements at the global scale, 2) assessing irrigated food production, 3) quantifying the impact of irrigation on climate, river discharge and groundwater depletion. Notwithstanding its ...
WACMOS-MED: STSE Water Cycle Multi-mission Observation Strategy for the Mediterranean
Monitoring the water cycle from satellite observations is one of the major goals of the EO community and closing the water budget has been a long-standing objective of international programs. After years of hard work, calibrating satellite data, improving inversion techniques, and facilitating the coherency of retrievals, it is admitted that the water cycle budget can now be ...
SMOS+RAINFALL
Quantitative information about precipitation is one vital input to meteorologists, hydrologic scientists, water resources managers, and environmental legislators. Yet, accurate measurement of precipitation over the relevant space and time scales remains a challenge. Soil moisture can be seen as the trace of the precipitation and, consequently, can be useful for providing a way to estimate rainfall accumulation or at least a new constrain to ...
H-SAF AS: Integration of PR-OBS-5 and SM-OBS-1 products through SM2RAIN algorithm for improving rainfall estimate
State-of-the-art satellite rainfall products are often the only way for measuring rainfall in remote areas of the world. However, these products may fail in properly reproducing the amount of precipitation reaching the ground, which is needed for hydrological applications. The integration of satellite soil moisture products is expected to significantly improve rainfall ...
37 YEARS OF SOIL MOISUTRE DERIVED RAINFALL: application of SM2RAIN to the CCI soil moisture product, algorithm improvement and product validation
Recently, IRPI-CNR has developed an innovative approach for estimating rainfall from satellite soil moisture data, named SM2RAIN. The ESA funded project “Climate Change Initiative - Soil Moisture“ (CCI-SM) offers a valuable opportunity for testing SM2RAIN algorithm to a continuous, homogenous, long-term (>30 years) soil moisture time series. Indeed, SM2RAIN has the chance to be tested not only for rainfall estimation but also as a ...
Use of SMAP soil moisture products for operational flood forecasting: data assimilation and antecedent wetness conditions assessment
COMMONS: Land cover change detection and monitoring methodologies based on the combined use of S1 and S2 for natural resources and hazard management
ESA Sentinels missions will provide enhanced capabilities in the revisit frequency, and the coverage. Their complete exploitation is in the combination of the two to advantage of a further increased revisiting time and in the use of different wavelenght domains. This reflects in the capabilities to detect features of changes induced by different factors including natural hazards and crop ...
H-SAF and GPM: precipitation algorithm development and validation activity
ESA Climate Change Initiative Soil Moisture
The CCI Programme wants to contribute to the data bases collecting ECVs required by GCOS (Global Climate Observing System) and other international parties. In particular, the Soil Moisture CCI will analyse the needs of the climate research community in terms of soil moisture data, adapt soil moisture satellite measurements for their use by the climate research community and create a long-term consistent soil moisture time series, based on ...
DInSAR techniques for the assessment of sinkhole hazard
Sinkholes occur as sudden collapses of the ground, related to natural cavities produced by karst processes in soluble rocks, or to man-made cavities deriving from different types of human activities in different historical ages. Sinkholes are widespread all over the world, and the related hazard is extremely high, with very severe damage to built-up areas and human infrastructures, and heavy losses to the ...
H SAF: EUMETSAT Satellite Application Facility on Support to Operational Hydrology and Water Management
The H-SAF generates and archives high-quality data sets and products for operational hydrological applications starting from the acquisition and processing of data from Earth observation satellites in geostationary and polar orbits operated both by EUMETSAT and other satellite organization. The retrieval of products uses data from microwave and infrared instruments and aims at reaching the best possible accuracy compatible with satellite ...