EGU2020-18567
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-18567
EGU General Assembly 2020
© Author(s) 2021. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Monitoring of river discharge through the combination of multiple satellite data: RIDESAT project

Angelica Tarpanelli1, Karina Nielsen2, Paolo Filippucci1, Rossella Belloni3, Stefania Camici1, Luca Brocca1, Tommaso Moramarco1, Marco Restano4, and Jérôme Benveniste5
Angelica Tarpanelli et al.
  • 1National Research Council, Research Institute for Geohydrological Protection, Perugia, Italy (a.tarpanelli@irpi.cnr.it)
  • 2Technical University of Denmark National Space Institute, Elektrovej Bygning 327, 2800 Kongens Lyngby, Denmark
  • 3University of Study of Roma Tre, Department of Engineering, Via Vito Volterra 62, 00146 Roma, Italy
  • 4SERCO/ESRIN, Via Galileo Galilei, Frascati I-00044, Italy
  • 5European Space Agency/ESRIN, Via Galileo Galilei, Frascati I-00044, Italy

RIDESAT - RIver flow monitoring and Discharge Estimation by integrating multiple SATellite data, is an ESA-funded Permanent Open Call project aimed to develop a new methodology for estimating river discharge through the combination of radar altimeter, optical and thermal satellite sensors. The combination of multi-sensor measurements can provide significant advantages over single sensors contributing to improve the quality of the final products also in terms of spatial and temporal coverage.

The methodology developed in the project includes two phases. First, the single-instrument products (altimeter, optical and thermal sensors) are independently processed to generate a dataset of proxies of hydraulic variables strongly linked with river discharge (e.g. water level, flow velocity, width). Successively, these proxies are implemented as integrated techniques for the final estimation of the river discharge.

To test the ability of the approach to retrieve river discharge at global scale, 20 pilot sites are selected all over the world, based on the availability of in-situ measurements and the climatic characteristics of the basins. The availability of large datasets of in situ measurements is used for: 1) the validation of single-instrument products and the river discharge product; 2) the evaluation of the uncertainty attributed to the combination process; 3) the evaluation of the limitation of the procedure.

How to cite: Tarpanelli, A., Nielsen, K., Filippucci, P., Belloni, R., Camici, S., Brocca, L., Moramarco, T., Restano, M., and Benveniste, J.: Monitoring of river discharge through the combination of multiple satellite data: RIDESAT project, EGU General Assembly 2020, Online, 4–8 May 2020, EGU2020-18567, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-18567, 2020.

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