Soil moisture mapping from ASAR imagery for the Flumendosa and Meuse river basins

Abstract

Soil moisture monitoring and the characterization of the spatial and temporal variability of this hydrologic parameter at scales from small catchments to large river basins continues to receive much attention, reflecting its critical role in subsurface – land surface – atmosphere interactions and its importance to drought analysis, crop yield forecasting, irrigation planning, flood protection, and forest fire prevention. We will describe the objectives and methodologies of an Envisat project that will aim to produce maps of seasonal soil moisture patterns at the regional scale based on ASAR imagery. The work will be carried out for two river basins that have significantly different climatic, geologic, and land use characteristics: the Flumendosa basin in Sardinia (Italy) and the larger Meuse basin that drains a good part of Belgium and the Netherlands as well as portions of France, Germany, and Luxembourg. High resolution ASAR data will be acquired over selected catchment scale test sites within each of these study regions, whereas medium resolution images will be acquired over the entire river basin (or extended region in the case of the smaller basin). A statistical analysis of the information from the processed images at these two different scales will be used to develop an aggregation methodology to generate large scale soil moisture maps. Data assimilation techniques will also be developed for dynamically integrating the high resolution satellite data into catchment scale hydrological simulation models. The work being planned will be placed in the context of recent efforts at validating and applying SAR soil moisture data, which we will briefly review.