Lecture Series “Innovation Pathways to Sustainability”: Prof. Gabriëlle de Lannoy

Title:
Integrating Earth observations and land surface modeling towards sustainable water management

Abstract:
Water on land is a crucial part of our natural Earth system and of our human livelihoods. In this talk, we will review the opportunities and limitations of satellite data for the quantification of water amounts, and how these data can be integrated into land surface models via data assimilation to produce timely, consistent, and accurate estimates of the water budget at any time and location on Earth. More specifically, we will illustrate how improved estimates of soil moisture, groundwater, snow and vegetation allow to limit the harm of natural hazards, to predict energy availability and agricultural production, or to monitor climate variability.
The examples will mainly use state-of-the-art land surface models in combination with (i) intermittent coarse-scale passive microwave observations from the SMOS and SMAP missions to estimate frequent global root-zone soil moisture globally and groundwater depths over peatlands, and (ii) intermittent finer-scale active microwave observations from the Sentinel-1 mission to correct for soil moisture, discharge and irrigation across test regions in Europe, and to estimate snow depth and discharge in the Alps. The discussion will reflect on the importance of models to integrate all the available satellite information, and how (missing information about) human activities such as land use change are affecting model results or model-data integration.

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