Water Monitoring from Space

Changing the Earth’s climate alters the likelihood of hydrological and extreme weather events such as droughts and floods. Changes in land-atmosphere feedback (in the warming climate) and the poor understanding of their impacts on hydrological processes have already caused challenges for water management practices world-wide.  By growing the observational capacity supported by national and international Earth Observation (EO) organizations, like European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA as well as advances in hydro-climatological modelling techniques and computational capabilities, there is a priority in research to improve estimation and prediction of water storage and fluxes and their interactions on different scales. This is pursued in our group by integrating satellite geodetic and EO data into models, and by developing data driven techniques, to improve the representation of the regional and global Water Cycle.