In the recent past, spaceborne geodetic sensors, designed for a variety of different purposes, have established themselves as valuable tools for hydrological, oceanographic, and cryospheric applications.
Radar satellite altimetry, originally aiming at oceanography and geodesy, has demonstrated its potential to act as virtual lake and river gauges. And future missions e.g. Sentinel 3, will be able to overcome the current limitations of spatial and temporal resolution.
Moreover, the exciting possibility of surface water extent monitoring using satellite imagery data (optical and SAR) raises the hope to better capture surface water variations and obtain a better overview about the hydrological behavior at continental scales.
The ubiquity of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) also provides a wealth of information on several components of the terrestrial water cycle. GNSS-based atmospheric sounding operationally monitors tropospheric water vapour content; GNSS-network deformation reflects amongst others loading effects from hydrological, cryospheric and atmospheric changes; and GNSS-reflectometry aims to measure both water-level heights and soil moisture.
The satellite mission GRACE provided a fundamentally new remote sensing tool for a wide spectrum of Earth science applications. Measuring changes in the Earth's gravitational field from space, it is able to monitor mass changes, related to changes in the ocean and the global hydrological cycle. Although the spatial resolution is still limited for such purposes, the mission has opened up new ways to strongly constrain the hydrological cycle at continental scales.
This session solicits contributions that demonstrate applications of spaceborne geodetic sensors, e.g. satellite altimetry, satellite imagery, GRACE, GNSS, SAR and InSAR, for hydro-geodesy, oceanography, and cryospheric applications.