OEMC project use case: Drought Monitoring at high resolution throughout Italy

Description

Description

This use case focuses on providing high-resolution (1 km) drought maps for Italy, delivered monthly. It combines various data sources, including satellite observations, models, and ground-based measurements, focusing on soil moisture, which can be used to indicate drought in meteorological, hydrological and agricultural drought. The primary goal is to improve the applicability of current datasets for drought assessment and monitoring, especially for applications at the local scale such as many human activities (e.g. irrigation, forest management, risks assessment), and to provide a reliable, standardized product for these users. A key aspect is the comparison of different data products in terms of resolution and consistency across scales to test their suitability for effective drought monitoring down to the 1 km spatial resolution. Multiple high-resolution soil moisture datasets barely match the needs of the users and the required actual resolution to analyze specific water resources risks and uses such as landslide risk forecasting and irrigation management. In fact multiple new datasets claiming high-resolution capabilities have much less effective resolution than declared. 

Stakeholder needs: 

• Stakeholders are aware of these difficulties and promote the analysis and development of soil moisture products at resolutions suitable for monitoring soil moisture at 1km spatial resolution or smaller. There are multiple applications of potential interest for the national agencies, like the Department of Civil Protection of Italy (DPC), for instance, to greatly increase the accuracy of the risk prevention and mitigation activities. However, to a great extent the 1km resolution is the barrier of applicability to expand the number of users from the EU and national agencies to the local users. Selecting actual 1km spatial resolution datasets would greatly increase the usefulness of the suitable remote sensing soil moisture datasets and make feasible new applications.

Planned implementation:

• Ease the use of Sentinel 1 datasets which are currently barely applied due to the challenges querying, processing and disseminating derived products from such a large amount of data.
• To open the path to operative high-resolution monitoring for water resources in near-real time.

Implementation steps include: 

• Collect different soil moisture remote sensing datasets claiming high resolution (1km) capabilities to test their effective resolution and identify their strengths and limitations.
• Test the applicability of the diverse datasets collected for processes across a wide range of scales from regional to local to plot scale: from extreme events like floods and drought (regional to county scale), irrigation (local to plot scale), to agriculture and forest management (plot scale) and landslide risk (plot)
• Additionally, determine the consistency of high-resolution datasets in comparison to the medium-resolution datasets in order to assess their compatibility to serve as nested products in the high-resolution water resources monitoring.

Recorded talks:

"Drought monitoring across scales with open soil moisture remote sensing data"  by Jaime Gaona, Open-Earth-Monitor — Global Workshop 2024;

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