SMAPEx and Rocco Panciera work in his seminar at Trento

Today Rocco gave his presentation here at his Alma Mater in Trento. Was a nice coming back and a beautiful presention of his work:

 Towards Global Remote Sensing of Soil Moisture: Australian Experiments

Abstract: Rocco panciera graduated from the University of trento in June 2013 with a thesis on distributed hydrological modelling under the supervision of Dr. Riccardo Rigon, and soon thereafter departed for the southern emisphere. He completed a Ph.D. at the University of Melbourne in 2010, with a thesis on remote sensing of near-surface soil moisture from airborne and spaceborne sensors, and since then has been working as a Research Fellow for the Australian Research Council, focusing on the estimation of soil moisture from airborne and spaceborne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR). Global monitoring of soil moisture using spaceborne passive microwave and SAR sensors is rapidly evolving from research into application, with the launch of soil moisture dedicated missions such as the Soil Moisture and ocean Salinity (SMOS, 2009) and the future Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP, 2014) missions. Moreover, there is an increasing trend in the availability of global coverage from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) active microwave sensors such as SAOCOM, Sentinel-1, ALOS 2, Cosmo-SkyMed,  providing the opportunity for long-term temporally-dense series of microwave observations which are suitable for soil moisture monitoring at fine resolution (<1km).  Rocco was heavily involved in series of large-scale airborne experiments conducted in Australia in the 2005-2011 time frame that provided airborne data in support of algorithm development for soil moisture estimation from such missions. This presentation reports on such experiments and a number of research activities emerging from those related to the estimation of near-surface soil moisture and vegetation type and biomass from passive microwave and SAR observations.

Click on the figure to see the presentation slides.

GB ET Potential Dataset for United Kingdom

In this post I am presenting another R exercise. Not that I believe very much on the physical content of the what Scottischsnow does here. (Actually this bold way of treating data and empirical formulas at large scale time and spatial is something that  I usually blame).
However the information gathered in this way could be useful as a reference step for doing physically based things, at a more detailed scale (for instance by using our JGrass-NewAGE).

Moreover I like it because it uses R all the way for extracting the data and visualising them, and this can be equally likely instructive.

Rainfall statistics for the Netherlands

One of my most successful postings is the one of R resources for hydrologists.   Sometimes contributions arrive from non -hydrologist. This is the case that  of two posts from Wiekvoet whose authors download and analyse rainfall data from the Netherlands  Royal Institute. The first post mainly performs an exploratory analysis of the data. The second one looks for rainfall changes in the past 100 years. Enjoy the reading.

As a byproduct one learn also how to use ggplot2 through some examples. 

From Yesterday Just Open Data from the Italian Administrations ?

Yesterday Mr. Monti government Agenda Digitale decree-Law was transformed in state law. Hopefully this would make open all the environmental data produced by public administrations.
Let's see, and hope.

The text of the law can be found here.

Repertorio Nazionale dei dati

Prendo pari pari da JGrassTechTips una iniziativa che mi sembra utile promuovere.



Anche AboutHydrology inserisce oggi nella sua homepage il link del Repertorio Nazionale dei Dati Territoriali (RNDT). Attualmente questo strumento sta muovendo i primi passi, ma noi desideriamo che entri a fare parte della “cassetta degli attrezzi” di ogni geomatico e, in prospettiva, di ogni cittadino italiano. Non siamo da soli, ma insieme a:

• freegis-italia
• GEOforUS
• Geofunction
• GEOmedia
• Gis e Infrastrutture
• Il muschio sugli alberi
• Kartoblog
• Map Freely
• massimozotti.it
• TANTO
• Un blog di "Alternativa Geologica"
• ....

Leggi l'articolo su TANTO.

Free Italian Cartographic Data on the Web

I received from Madi Di Leo  the news that a lot of Italian cartographic data are available at the geoSDI web site. The data that can be found at:

http://www.geosdi.org/index.php/it/blog/item/geoportale-dati-cartografici

Data contain at the moment 2500 layers of information and are free. There are also a couple of videos to let people to know how to use the web site. Unfortunately, for foreign,  all information is in Italian, so far.

Prendo da JGrassTechTips il link del Repertorio Nazionale dei Dati Territoriali (RNDT). Attualmente questo strumento sta muovendo i primi passi, leggi l'articolo su TANTO.

Utilizing online resources for climatic research

Mamhud, continues his excellent job here in presenting free data. Moreover he used his findings for driving the model SWAT in this other post. I use different models but the indications are anyway quite useful.

This intervetion is the second one. The first can be found here.

Small catchments free data

I will use this post to collect the information about data from catchments for a possible future use with the model GEOtop (or by JGrass-NewAGE).  What I am looking for are catchments as those referenced by Mirus et al (2009). However, the data referred in the paper, are, apparently, not all freely available. Anyone is invited to indicate catchments were similar data are available.

Here it is the list of catchments:

Tarrawarra
The Tarrawarra data set is a detailed set of hydrological data from a catchment experiment that aimed to investigate the spatial pattern of soil moisture at the small catchment scale. A variety of data was collected which we believe is (at least in 1997) unique in the high level of detail it provides and in the range of catchment conditions it covers.

Sleepers River (USA)
Sleepers River has one of the longest historical data bases and continuous research programs for a cold-region area in the United States. Hydrologic and energy data have been collected continuously since 1958 (Pionke and others, 1986). The site has been administered by the Agriculture Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (1957-1975), the Office of Hydrology of the National Weather Service (1966-1986) and the U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) (1979 to present).


Panola
This website provides public access to the hillslope dataset collected from the Panola Mountain Research Watershed experimental hillslope during the period from January through June 2002 and briefly described in the WRR datanote publication.



Please see also http://www.experimental-hydrology.net/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

Utilizing Online Resources for Hydrological Research

I got from LinkedIn this website where Mamhud illustrates several on-line resources by means of videos.

The blog and the site itself are full of interesting information and useful for any hydrologist.