Soil Moisture
The aim of the project is to develop an operational monitoring service that captures soil moisture in Germany with high spatial and temporal resolution, model-based down to a depth of 1.8 meters. Within the framework of the Natural Climate Protection Action Program, the service will provide reliable datasets for climate protection, water management, and ecological resilience. The project “Development of a Monitoring Service for the Detection and Modeling of Soil Moisture” is being carried out by TU Dresden (Chairs of Meteorology and Environmental Remote Sensing) in cooperation with PIKOBYTES GmbH.
At the core of the project is the implementation of the 1D hydrological model BROOK90 (R implementation) into a daily, operational framework on a 300-m grid, driven by spatially interpolated DWD data. Model parameterization is based on remote sensing datasets: the Copernicus LAI (300 m, 10-day), vegetation height information – either from existing products or from a newly developed 500-m dataset – as well as land cover data (ATKIS/CLC+).
The nationwide model framework will be transferred into operational use within the CODE-DE cloud. Validation of the model outputs will be carried out using in-situ measurements (e.g., BDF, OPEN·SENSOR·WEB) as well as Sentinel-1 data, applying established quality criteria.