Background and objective
Water is mankind’s most critical natural resource and must be managed carefully. Hydrological models are key scientific decision support tools in water resources management. Hydrological modellers generally lack data to calibrate and validate their models. Space-borne and ground based geodetic observations provide valuable calibration and validation datasets for surface and groundwater flow models and constrain important hydrological parameters, such as aquifer specific yield, actual evapotranspiration and runoff coefficients.

This course will cover the following techniques: Space-borne and ground based time-lapse gravity observations, Radar altimetry, and Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR). Time-lapse gravity gives estimates of total water storage change in the earth system. Radar/Lidar altimetry provides time series of water level elevations in rivers, lakes and reservoirs. InSAR can be used to map soil moisture and wetland water levels.

The course will focus on the theoretical basis of the methods, data acquisition and processing. We will put emphasis on the quantitative use of the data in a generalized hydrogeophysical approach. In this approach, hydrological models are run and the output of the hydrological models is converted to synthetic geodetic signals. Subsequently the synthetic and observed geodetic signals are compared and hydrological model parameters are adjusted to produce an optimal fit.