Terrestrial land surfaces are characterised by strong heterogeneities of, among other variables, soil texture, orography, land cover, snow, or Soil Moisture (SM). SM is of broad scientific interest due to its role in the Earth system: It impacts the partitioning of the incoming water and energy over land and affects then the variability of the …
Landscape fires, whether natural or human-induced, have a key impact on the Earth system via the release of pollutants, greenhouse gases and aerosols, affecting human health and climate. Over the next decades their role may increase related to drier and warmer conditions, exacerbating biome shifts and lowering biodiversity. In addition, this may provide one of …
Expected sea-level rise through the remainder of the 21st century has been primarily attributed to the continued melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS). This loss of ice not only directly threatens coastal infrastructure around Europe but precipitates second-order effects such as proliferation of diseases, crop instability and increased health stressors. Therefore, there is a …
Global mean sea level (GMSL) is considered one of the leading indicators of global climate change as it reflects changes taking place in different components of the climate system. Present-day sea level rise and its acceleration, currently estimated by high-precision satellite altimetry measurements, are primarily driven by anthropogenic global warming, more specifically by ocean warming-induced …
The WISE (Wide-Area Sentinel-1 Deformation Classification for Advanced Data Exploitation) project focuses on developing advanced tools to exploit the large amount of satellite-borne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data. The main data source will be the Sentinel-1 SAR data: this Copernicus mission provides, with its fast revisit time, high-resolution and multi-polarization, an unprecedented amount of data, …
Surface albedo controls the absorption of sunlight and its reflection back to the atmosphere and space. The bright, highly reflecting surfaces such as seasonal snow cover and sea ice cover that expand to cover large areas during winter and shrink in coverage during summer have high impact on the surface energy balance of the Earth. …
