During the southern summer season of 2015 and 2016, South Africa experienced one of the most severe meteorological droughts since the start of climate recording due to an exceptionally strong El Niño event. To investigate spatio-temporal dynamics of surface moisture and vegetation structure, data from ESA’s Copernicus Sentinel-1/-2 and NASA’s Landsat-8 for the period between March 2015 and...
This study aims at providing water body dynamics maps at highest temporal resolution for better wetland characterization from space and as such is a mapping component of H-2020 project Satellite-based Wetland Observation Service (SWOS) (Grant No 642088). By depending on freely available data and demanding a high acquisition frequency across a large number of test sites from the North of Sweden...
Soil moisture (SM) content is an essential climate variable that is operationally delivered at low resolution (e.g. 36-9 km) by earth observation missions, such as ESA/SMOS, NASA/SMAP and EUMETSAT/ASCAT. However numerous land applications would benefit from the availability of soil moisture maps at higher resolution. For this reason, there is a large research effort to develop soil moisture...
For the first time, the Copernicus Programme of the European Union provides access to valuable satellite Earth Observation data and dedicated services for the interested public free of charge. The satellites Sentinel-1 and 2 offer extensive sets of microwave and optical data at least until the year 2030. This guaranteed long-term availability enables the development of value-added information...
Climate change and frequent episodes of severe drought urge to monitor soil moisture changes at global scale. To answer this demand the European Space Agency (ESA) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) launched two satellite missions: Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS), and Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP); consisting of radiometers acquiring data in L-band...
Soil moisture plays an important role in land surface processes such as water and energy fluxes. To derive soil moisture in high spatial and temporal resolution SAR remote sensing technologies has proven to be very suitable. Over the last decades different retrieval approaches, from empirical (Water Cloud Model) over semi-empirical (Oh et al., Dubois et al.) to more physical based (Integral...
Despite the technological and scientific advances in recent decades, it is still a challenge to accurately forecast the onset and/or the spatio-temporal evolution of high impact weather events (HIWE), especially in complex topography coastal areas (present, for instance, in the Mediterranean Region). Nowadays, the skill of numerical weather prediction (NWP) models has improved thanks to the...
SAR interferometric closure phases signal consists in a kind of inconsistency in triplets of interferograms. Closure phases have been shown to carry information about the propagation in semi-transparent media, typically the moisture status in soils and forests. Simple physical models can explain the phenomenon.
Recently, we have developed an inversion algorithm based on closure phases to...
