37 YEARS OF SOIL MOISUTRE DERIVED RAINFALL: application of SM2RAIN to the CCI soil moisture product, algorithm improvement and product validation

Background

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 validation tool for the CCI-SM project.

Scopo

The main purpose of the project are:

1. to apply SM2RAIN to the CCI-SM products in order to build new retrospective rainfall datasets based on multi-decadal blended soil moisture products, and
2. to develop a valuable tool for the validation of the CCI-SM products.

Metodi

The activity is expected to provide significant benefits for both climate and operational applications. Moreover, it will supply a quick and robust validation tool for soil moisture observations. All the research tasks will be implemented within the new platform “Earth Observation Data Centre for Water Resources Monitoring” which exploits the most recent and powerful computational resources for managing and using satellite data.