Prof. Niels Skou, Ass. Prof. Henning Skriver, Ass. Prof. Inge Sandholt
Source of funding:
DTU Scholarship, DTU Space, Villum Kann Rasmussen Foundation
International collaboration:
Description of research:
My PhD is part of the Hydrological Observatory and Exploratorium (HOBE) in the Skjern river catchment (Jutland, Denmark), work package 3 – soil moisture and recharge. HOBE was established to carry out integrated and interdisciplinary measurements and experiments at a hierarchy of nested temporal and spatial scales on different land cover types. The objective is to create a high density multi-scale data set that can help to reduce the uncertainty in water balance closure of hydrological models at catchment scale and to improve water resource management decisions.
The primary goal of my PhD is to combine and compare air- and space-borne soil moisture data across scales and validate them against in-situ measurements. This way I try to create solid catchment soil moisture data suitable for assimilation into the HOBE hydrological model to support the improvement of model predictions. In this context I also aim at assessing the usefulness of soil moisture data obtained from the passive L-band microwave radiometer on the forthcoming ESA satellite SMOS with a coarse spatial resolution of approx. 50 km for investigations in relatively small areas such as the HOBE catchment – especially taking the small distance to the coast line of the North Sea into account.
The chosen approach includes (1) the planning and accomplishment of a soil moisture ground measurement network and an airborne L-band microwave radiometer campaign including simultaneous acquisition of ground truth in the Skjern river catchment, (2) the application of soil moisture retrieval algorithms to obtain soil moisture products from passive air-and spaceborne microwave measurements, and (3) the utilization of up- and downscaling techniques to render data sets acquired at different spatial scales comparable. Auxiliary data correlating with soil moisture (e.g. meteorological/hydrological, terrain, vegetation/land cover and soil data) will be a task in all of these steps.
