Accurate measurement of precipitation over the relevant space and time scales is a challenge. The SMOS+RAINFALL project has the objective to ingest satellite soil moisture information derived from ASCAT, SMOS and SMAP into the latest state-of-the-art satellite precipitation products like those derived from the Global Precipitation Measurement mission (GPM) to enhance rainfall observation accuracy over land. Access the datasets generated by …
Several recent studies have concluded that climate change causes major changes in the global water cycle. There is increasing evidence that part of the multi-decadal trends observed on the sea surface salinity (SSS) are due to changes in the global water cycle, e.g. the western tropical Pacific has become fresher and the subtropical North Atlantic …
The Arctic is a complex region encompassing different physical and biogeochemical processes and interactions among several components of the Earth system (e.g., sea ice, ocean, glaciers, ice caps, the Greenland Ice Sheet, snow, lakes and river ice, permafrost, vegetation, complex interactions with the atmosphere, people, etc.). Changes in the Arctic have a strong impact on …
Follow the links and find out about the importance of studying the whole water cycle and how this has been tackled in the Mediterranean within a recently published paper presented at the Living Planet Symposium.
The STREAM Project (SaTellite based Runoff Evaluation And Mapping), led by CNR-IRPI with the participation of the Institute of Geodesy (GIS) at University of Stuttgart, aimed at developing innovative methods able to maximize the recovery of information on runoff contained in current satellite observations of climatic and environmental variables (i.e., precipitation, soil moisture, terrestrial water …
The RIDESAT Project (RIver flow monitoring and Discharge Estimation by integrating multiple SATellite data) aims at developing a new methodology for the joint exploitation of three sensors (altimeter, optical and thermal) for river flow monitoring and discharge estimation. Even if with a number of limitations, satellite radar altimetry over surface inland water has demonstrated its …
A good aircraft heating was necessary to secure proper functioning of the on-board instrumentation during the airborne campaign that took place last November in the Arctic, flying between Ottawa and Iqaluit. The campaign exploited several radars and lidars to measure cloud particles and precipitation by looking at signals bouncing off ice crystals and water droplets …
The gravity gradients of the highly successful ESA Earth Explorer mission GOCE (Gravity field and steady-state ocean circulation explorer), which have been reprocessed by applying enhanced calibration strategies in the frame of the ESA project GOCE High-level Processing Facility (HPF), have reached a very high quality level, especially in the long-wavelength spectral range where the …
The possibility to operationally monitor the Earth’s land cover (changes) at high temporal resolution is nowadays given by EO multispectral dense time series available at global level, in particular Sentinel-2 and Landsat 8 data. Nonetheless, keeping thematic maps regularly updated is a complex and time consuming task. Large efforts have been devoted to date in …
Feeding a growing global population is a major concern, but efforts to grow more food will place an added burden on precious supplies of freshwater. New research shows how measurements of soil moisture from space could be used to understand how much water is used for agriculture and potentially help farmers manage consumption. A new …
