4DMED-Hydrology

Developing an advanced, high-resolution, and consistent reconstruction of the Mediterranean terrestrial water cycle

4DMED-Hydrology

Project Summary

4DMED-Hydrology aims at developing an advanced, high-resolution, and consistent reconstruction of the Mediterranean terrestrial water cycle by using the latest developments of Earth Observation (EO) data as those derived from the ESA-Copernicus missions. In particular, by exploiting previous ESA initiatives, 4DMED-Hydrology intends:

1. to demonstrate how this EO capacity can help to describe the interactions between complex hydrological processes and anthropogenic pressure (often difficult to model) in synergy with model-based approaches;

2. to exploit synergies among EO data to maximize the retrieval of information of the different water cycle components (i.e., precipitation, soil moisture, evaporation, runoff, river discharge) to provide an accurate representation of our environment and advanced fit-for-purpose decision support systems in a changing climate for a more resilient society.

4DMED-Hydrology will focus on four test areas, namely the Po river basin in Italy, the Ebro River basin in Spain, the Hérault River basin in France and the Medjerda River basin in Tunisia, which are representatives of climates, topographic complexity, land use, human activities and hydrometeorological hazards of the Mediterranean Region (MR). The developed products will be then extended to the entire region. The resulting EO-based products (i.e., experimental datasets, EO products) will be made available in an Open Science catalogue hosted and operated by ESA.

ESA Contract No. 4000136272/21/I-EF

Period:  January 2022 – December 2023 (24 months)
Partners: The consortium is leaded by CNR-IRPI (Perugia, Italy) with the collaboration of 9 partners:

Vienna University of Technology (TUWIEN, Austria)

Ghent University (UGent, Belgium)

CIMA Research Foundation (CIMA, Italy)

ESTELLUS SAS (ESTELLUS, France)

Observatori de l’Ebre (OBSEBRE, Spain)

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KULeuven, Belgium)

VANDERSAT B.V. (VANDERSAT, Nederland)

EURAC Research – Accademia Europea di Bolzano (EURAC, Italy)

HydroSciences Montpellier (Institut de recherche pour le développement) (HSM, France)

Background

The Mediterranean Region (MR) includes the largest semi-enclosed sea on Earth and is an area of both exceptional biodiversity value and intense and increasing human activities. MR has a unique character as it is located in a transition zone between temperate, cold mild-latitudes and the tropics with several large-scale atmospheric oscillations/teleconnection patterns. This determines a high temporal variability of climate which causes periods of excess water with widespread floods followed by long drought episodes and heat waves, making the region highly vulnerable to hydrological extremes. Therefore, resolving the water cycle over the MR is central for protecting people and guaranteeing water and food security.

Previous efforts to resolve the water cycle in the MR have mainly used model outputs or reanalysis and in situ data networks. In this context, the European Space Agency (ESA) has supported significant scientific efforts to advance the way we can observe and characterize the Mediterranean water cycle from satellites with Watchful, Irrigation+, and WACMOS-Med projects. For instance, the WACMOS-Med considered a number of novel techniques to ensure that the different components of the Mediterranean water cycle could be estimated from satellite observations while minimizing the residual errors. WACMOS-Med provided a clear assessment of the different limitations of current satellite technology to characterize in a consistent and accurate manner the different components of the water cycle. However, limitations associated to resolution in space and time, accuracies, uncertainty definition and inter-product consistency hinder the practical use of the products for operational application in several domains (e.g., agriculture, water resource management, hydro-climatic extremes and geo-hazards) over the MR.

4DMED-Hydrology will go beyond this by:

1) developing high-resolution (1 km, daily, 2015–2021) EO-based datasets of the different components of the water cycle;

2) merging these datasets to obtain land water budget closure and providing a consistent high-quality merged dataset;

3) addressing major knowledge gaps in water cycle sciences and society.

News

1. We published 4DMED project – Hydrological datasets: CLICK HERE

2. ESA has approved the Network of Resource sponsor for 4DMED-Hydrology project.

3. Research papers and conference abstracts:
Massari et al. 2022. 4DMED-Hydrology: capitalizing high resolution Earth Observation data for a consistent reconstruction of the Mediterranean terrestrial water cycle. Living Planet Symposium Session, Bonn, 23-27 May 2022.

Avanzi et al. : How much snow is there across the Mediterranean region? IGS International Symposium on Snow Davos, September 2022.

Rains, D., Trigo, I., Dutra, E., Ermida, S., Ghent, D., Hulsman, P., Gómez-Dans, J., and Miralles, D. G. High-resolution all-sky land surface temperature and net radiation over Europe, submitted to Earth System Science Data (ESSD). (Submitted)

Zhong, F., Jiang, S., van Dijk, A. I. J. M., Ren, L., Schellekens, J., and Miralles, D. G.: Revisiting large-scale interception patterns constrained by a synthesis of global experimental data, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci. Discuss., https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-2022-155, 2022.

Datasets

Coming soon

Publications

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Contacts