Integrated Monitoring of Lake Garda with Radar, Optical Sensors and In Situ Instruments: Insights from the SARLAKES Project

Integrated Monitoring of Lake Garda with Radar, Optical Sensors and In Situ Instruments: Insights from the SARLAKES Project

Virginia Zamparelli¹, Simona Verde¹, Andrea Petrossi¹, Gianfranco Fornaro¹, Marina Amadori^2,3, Mariano Bresciani², Giacomo De Carolis², Francesca De Santi⁴, Matteo De Vincenzi³, Giulio Dolcetti³, Ali Farrokhi³, Raffaella Frank², Nicola Ghirardi^2,5, Claudia Giardino², Fulvio Gentilin⁶, Alessandro Oggioni², Marco Papetti⁶, Gianluca Pari⁷ Andrea Pellegrino², Sebastiano Piccolroaz³, Tazio Strozzi⁸, Marco Toffolon³, Maria Virelli⁷, Nestor Yague-Martinez⁹, and Giulia Valerio⁶

 

¹Institute for Electromagnetic Sensing of the Environment (IREA), National Research Council, Naples, Italy

²Institute for Electromagnetic Sensing of the Environment (IREA), National Research Council, Milan, Italy

³Department of Civil, Environmental and Mechanical Engineering (DICAM), University of Trento, Trento, Italy

⁴Institute for Applied Mathematics and Information Technologies (IMATI), National Research Council, Milan, Italy

⁵ Institute for BioEconomy (IBE), National Research Council, Sesto Fiorentino, Italy

⁶Department of Civil, Environmental, Architectural Engineering and Mathematics (DICATAM), University of Brescia, Brescia, Italy

⁷Italian Space Agency (ASI), Rome, Italy

⁸GAMMA Remote Sensing, Gümligen, Switzerland

⁹Capella Space Corp., San Francisco, CA, USA

 

SARLAKES (SpatiAlly Resolved veLocity and wAves from SAR images in laKES) is a PRIN (Projects of National Interest) project funded in 2022 by the Italian Ministry of University and Research. The project is now in its final phase and is scheduled to end at the beginning of 2026. The project developed a novel, advanced and adaptable tool capable of accurately measuring water dynamics in medium- and large-sized lakes.

A key and innovative aspect of the project is the use of spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data, which are widely exploited for routine observation of the marine environments but remain relatively underutilized for lake monitoring. SARLAKES investigated the capability of SAR imagery to retrieve the spatial distribution of wind fields, surface currents, and wind-generated waves in lacustrine environments.

The project considers Lake Garda and Lake Geneva as case studies, with Lake Garda—the largest lake in Italy—selected as the primary test site due to the research group’s long-standing experience and the availability of extensive historical data.

This contribution presents the main results obtained over two years of project activity, with particular emphasis on outcomes from a multidisciplinary field campaign conducted on April 2025. The campaign aimed to reconstruct lake surface currents during a strong wind event in the peri-Alpine Lake Garda region.

The field instrumentation included a wave buoy, an acoustic Doppler current profiler (ADCP), Lagrangian drifters, anemometers, a ground-based radar, fixed cameras, a drone, and a conductivity–temperature–depth profiler. Satellite acquisitions from the COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation and Capella Space SAR sensors, as well as from the optical sensor PRISMA were scheduled over the study area during the campaign. Archive data from Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2, Sentinel-3, Landsat, and COSMO-SkyMed missions were also utilized.

The project demonstrates how the integration of in-situ instrumentation, spatially distributed flow measurements from remote sensing, and hydrodynamic modeling provides a comprehensive and scalable approach to next-generation monitoring of complex lake systems.