Description

Water resource management needs to consider a wide range of spatial scales and address a variety of problems, e.g. monitoring and managing droughts and water availability for different uses (root zone soil moisture, stream discharge as well as groundwater levels). Models provide an alternative to observations by bridging different scales and different processes, but the fidelity of model output strongly depends on the physical processes considered which in turn requires detailed information on the state of the soil and vegetation system and relevant forcings at the scale of interest. Therefore, there is a pressing need to harmonize the available information on the soil/vegetation system to reach a feasible approach for actual water management. A recent example is the 2018 summer drought, which posed challenges for water availability in vast regions in Europe, including some ill prepared to cope with water scarcity. Climate change presents additional challenges regarding the preparedness and adaptation to future extremes, because e.g. similar or worse future events to that in 2018 may be expected more frequently.

Objectives and Methodology

The topic deals with the scaling from global satellite water cycle products to field scale water states which includes both the surface and profile information on water states – with a focus on soil moisture and evapotranspiration. One of the two tasks or both can be focused.
Task 1.1 Spatial downscaling procedures and data products
This task will develop and test a number of procedures to downscale remotely sensed water cycle products to scales suitable for water management purposes:
Task 1.2 Derive profile soil water content from surface soil moisture information
While downscaling coarse scale remotely sensed water cycle products to fine spatial scales is achieved in Task 1.1, the remote sensing products typically refer to surface information that needs to be transferred to the depth, at least to the root-zone and be linked up in a consistent physical framework that will be accomplished in this task.
This task will provide high resolution spatio-temporal pattern of root-zone SWC and evapotranspiration that can be linked to the patterns of soil and land use in the different catchments.

Further reading