ESA SEOM: Scientific Exploitation of Operational Missions

As the title suggests, the project leans on data from operational missions, in this case the Sentinel missions. The subtitle of the project was Development of pan-European Multi-Sensor Snow Mapping Methods Exploiting Sentinel-1. The aim of the project was to detect not only snow, as has been shown in other projects, but also whether the snow is wet or dry. Such information provides valuable insights for the fields of hydrology and meteorology. Once one is able to detect snow melt, it is possible to pin-point the onset of the melt season. This is done on gigantic scales with scatterometers, a different type of radar satellite, for the Arctic and Antarctic. However, these have very coarse resolutions; in the order of a few kilometers at least. Therefore, Sentinel-1 is a good choice when monitoring areas at a relatively small scale, such as the European Alps, because a Sentinel-1 pixel is in the order of meters.

The story does not stop there. That is because over the Antarctic or Greenland ice sheet you can be sure there is snow and ice. For the example of the European Alps, it is not always certain there is snow everywhere. Although radar is very well able to distinguish between wet and dry surfaces, it cannot help much when telling snow and snow free areas apart. Additional information is therefore required. Optical sensors onboard of Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-3 can provide exactly that. So the novelty and the objective here is the development, implementation and validation of methods and tools for generating maps of snowmelt area for the Pan-European domain.

The work was presented at the 2020 EGU in Vienna.

The project consortium consist of ENVEO IT GmbH with the Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI), the University of Zürich (UZH), the Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE), Northern Research Institute (NORUT).

You can read more about it here and here.

If you want to read more about ESA SEOM projects, you can find more on this web page.

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