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
• Precipitation rate and cumulate precipitation, including liquid/solid discrimination,
• Soil moisture in the surface layer and possibly in the roots region and
• Snow parameters such as effective cover, wet/dry discrimination and water equivalent.
H-SAF membership includes 11 EUMETSAT member or cooperating States (Austria,
Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Turkey)
and ECMWF. Host of H-SAF is the Italian Met Service. The algorithms for satellite rainfall
estimation used in H-SAF will be considered and tested with respect to requirements of
GLOWASIS.
IPF is again contributing to H-SAF with expertise on soil moisture. The basis for all soil
moisture products in H-SAF is the radar scatterometer ASCAT on Metop. The three soil
moisture products that emerged from the development phase were:
• Large-scale surface soil moisture derived from ASCAT for the H-SAF area (SM-OBS- 1),
• Small-scale surface soil moisture resulting from disaggregation of the EUMETSAT CAF
global soil moisture from ASCAT (SM-OBS-2);
• Volumetric soil moisture (SM-ASS-1) for the H-SAF area (four soil layers up to a depth of
three metres). SM-ASS-1 is now part of ECMWF’s operational service and not
considered an H-SAF product anymore.
The development of two other products is planned in the current phase:
• A Soil Wetness Index in the root zone resulting from assimilation of CAF global ASCAT-
Soil Moisture product in a NWP model (SM-ASS-2) and
• Global large-scale surface soil moisture derived from ASCAT for the H-SAF area (SM-
OBS-3) as the successor of the EUMETSAT CAF global soil moisture product.
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