EUMETSAT Satellite Application Facility on Support to Operational Hydrology & Water Management

01.09.2005 - 31.08.2010

Assigned research project

Meteorological satellites operated by EUMETSAT can provide information on a wide range of environmental processes taking place in the atmosphere and on the Earth¿s surface. For development and production of higher-level geophysical products, EUMETSAT has established a network of so-called Satellite Application Facilities (SAFs) which undertake, on a distributed basis, the necessary research, development and operational services and products aimed at enhancing the value and use of meteorological satellite data for applications. The objective of the H-SAF is to support operational hydrology and water management in Europe by providing remotely sensed information about rainfall, soil moisture and snow cover in near-real-time. The task of TU Wien is to develop, together with the Austrian Weather Service (ZAMG) and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), soil moisture products based on data acquired by the Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT) on-board METOP. The role of TU Wien is to develop algorithms for retrieval of surface soil moisture information for European watersheds, which will later be operated by ZAMG. The task of ECMWF is to assimilate the ASCAT surface soil moisture data into their models to estimate the root-zone soil moisture content which is also of high interest for hydrological models. The H-SAF is hosted by the Italian Weather Service (Officio Generale per la Meteorologia).

People

Project leader

Wolfgang Wagner (E120)

Project personnel

Institute

E120 - Department of Geodesy and Geoinformation

Contract/collaboration

Zentralanstalt für Meteorologie und Geodynamik

Research focus

Environmental Monitoring and Climate Adaptation: 100%

Keywords

German	English
Scatterometer	Scatterometer
Bodenfeuchtigkeit	Soil Moisture
Hydrologie	Hydrology
Hochwasser	flood
Wasserwirtschaft	water resources management

Publications

Publications