Global Drought Monitoring Service through the GEOSS Architecture ...

Architectural Implementation Pilot, Phase 3 Version: 2.0
Global Drought Monitoring and European Drought
Observatory-Water SBA Engineering Report
Date: 11/Feb/2011
now be used to increase the reliability of information that is fed into models for monitoring and
forecasting. The Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization (CSIRO)
currently rely on optical data in combination with passive microwave technologies and digital
elevation models. Incorporating ASAR in the system would result in several advantages: on one
hand, reliability and accuracy increases through higher resolution, while, on the other, cloudindependent
continuous monitoring is possible. Figure 3 illustrates relative soil moisture
saturation on Australia’s Eastern coast during the flood events of December 2010.
Figure 3 Relative soil moisture from ASAR onboard ENVISAT during Floods in Australia (25th
of December). Blue colours represent highly saturated soils, while brown stands for extremely
dry soil conditions (IPF, 2010)
2.6.3 Satellite Application Facility on Support to Operational Hydrology and
Water Management (H-SAF)
H-SAF was established by the EUMETSAT Council in July 2005. The Development phase
started in September 2005. Within the H-SAF framework the focus for new satellite products lies
on:
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