Multi-model hydrological reference dataset over continental Europe and an African basin

Although Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) have been widely adopted as important metrics for guiding scientific and policy decisions, the Earth Observation (EO) and Land Surface and Hydrologic Model (LSM/HM) communities have yet to treat terrestrial ECVs in an integrated manner. To develop consistent terrestrial ECVs at regional and continental scales, greater collaboration between EO and LSM/HM communities is needed. An essential first step is assessing the LSM/HM simulation uncertainty. To that end, we introduce a new hydrological reference dataset that comprises a range of 19 existing LSM/HM simulations that represent the current state-of-the-art of our LSM/HMs. Simulations are provided on a daily time step, covering Europe, notably the Rhine and Po river basins, alongside the Tugela river basin in Africa, and are uniformly formatted to allow comparisons across simulations. Furthermore, simulations are comprehensively evaluated with discharge, evapotranspiration, soil moisture and total water storage anomaly observations. Our dataset provides valuable information to support policy development and serves as a benchmark for generating consistent terrestrial ECVs through the integration of EO products.

The paper was just accepted on Scientific Data ans the preprint can be found clicking on the Figure above. 

4DHydro website

 4DHydro is a project that came out from a call for tender by  ESA to which we had the pleasure to participate. All the making of the project is, since last week documented on the 4DHydro website that you can find following this link.

Not yet available, soon you'll see here a video explaining what the website is supposed to contain. 

A Ph.D. position on Po River, DARTHs, Earth Observations

I have an open Ph.D. position which closes at July 6: - Evolution of the system GEOframe/OMS3/CSIP for the building ofa Digital Twin of the Hydrology of river Po - E66E23000170001 

It looks like it is very dedicate to informatics (see also here) but let me say that the candidate should write their  project with a broader view, although it must remain within the scope of what we are doing in the context of the Po River basin project and  related to the exploitation of satellite data to support hydrological modeling. The project that funds it, besides PNRR,  is 4DHYdro, which collects some of the best hydrological modellers in Europe (and from the projects' goal you can find inspiration). 

The general focus of the study are droughts and can contains more computer science-related parts, more conceptual parts, or more applied parts. The themes related to the processes are: snow, plant transpiration, and crop needs. The enabling technology is precisely the systematic use of Earth observation, and the concept paper for the whole system is the one about DARTHs. Further information on DARTHs can be found here. 

If, at this point, you are a little convinced to apply also consider the philosophy of our group that you can find in a sequence of posts, here and and links therein.

Our group is a  crew of international fellows: 2 Indians, 1 Pakistani, 1French, 1 Iranian, 1 Algerian and 8 Italians, including two professors, one researcher (at Eurac), two postdocs, and nine Ph.D. students already. 

4DHydro - Hyper-resolution Earth observations and land-surface modeling for a better understanding of the water cycle

The 4DHydro Project, a shortname for Hyper-resolution Earth observations and land-surface modeling for a better understanding of the water cycle is an ESA contract  . The overarching objective of the Hyper-resolution Earth observations and land-surface modelling for a better understanding of the water cycle project, hereafter 4DHydro , is to foster a wide and thriving collaboration between the EO water cycle community developing novel high-resolution EO data products, and the land surface and hydrological modelling community engaged in advancing hyper-resolution modelling of the hydrological cycle at regional and continental scales.

Participants include most of the groups working on these topics in Europe. The synthesis of the proposal can be found here.