SEA

Soil moisture Estimation optimized for Alpine areas (SEA) is aimed at analysing the most up-to-date algorithms based mainly on satellite data (in particular SAR data) and implementing a product to evaluate the soil water content of the top layer of the soil in Alpine areas.

Soil moisture content is a key parameter in many hydrological processes, where it controls the infiltration rate during precipitation events, runoff production, and evapotranspiration. At the same time, its estimation is important in meteorology, climatology, agriculture and disaster management.

Many algorithms have been already developed by exploiting data with coarse spatial resolution and/or aimed at a global scale perspective, which achieve good performance on average.

Unfortunately, Alpine areas are too heterogeneous for coarse spatial resolution products and the terrain characteristics are very peculiar in terms of topography and land cover. This aspect means that the previously mentioned algorithms do not behave very well in this case. Given these considerations, and the large interest on this area of Soil Moisture Content (SMC) maps for various purposes, the objective of this is to implement an algorithm that improves and/or consolidates existing products that estimate soil moisture in the specific case of the Alpine environment.

Contact persons: Giovanni Cuozzo, Mariapina Castelli, Claudia Notarnicola giovanni.cuozzo@eurac.edu, mariapina.castelli@eurac.edu, claudia.notarnicola@eurac.edu