OEMC project use case: High resolution Snow Water Equivalent in selected mountain regions

Description

We propose to produce a snow water equivalent (SWE)  product at a spatial resolution of 20 meters. The product will be available for selected mountain basins in South Tyrol on a daily temporal resolution, updated on a yearly basis. We rely on a multi-sensor EO SWE reconstruction method using Sentinel-2, MODIS, potentially Sentinel-1 and in-situ data. The information will be of value for different applications such as earth system models, irrigation planning and hydro power planning (e.g. Eumetsat/ZAMG). The Province of South Tyrol is a local stakeholder planning to evaluate the data for their hydrological planning activities.

Stakeholder needs: 

• High-resolution and daily data over some selected hydrological catchments that are relevant for the Hydrological Office of the Province of Bolzano;
• Open access data that respect the FAIR principle, easy to access and download. 

Planned implementation:

Implementation steps include: 

• High-resolution snow cover classification (Sentinel-2 or Landsat data);
• Data fusion algorithm to obtain daily high-resolution snow cover data (merging high-resolution snow cover maps with low-resolution snow cover maps, such as MODIS);
• SWE reconstruction using a degree-day model forced with available in-situ temperature or re-analysis data;
• Implementation in OpenEO to upscale the algorithm.

Knowledge Resources

Funding awards