A Cloud-Based System for High-Resolution Soil Moisture Monitoring over Austria

Soil moisture is a pivotal variable in the coupled water-, energy-, and carbon cycles, and is hence of high interest to a wide range of applications. Both public- and private organisations need soil moisture data to improve their services, yet the spatio-temporal resolution of operationally available soil moisture data has so far not met the requirements of many public-sector and commercial applications.

The BMon (short for “Bodenfeuchte-Monitor”) project builds upon these three major innovations where the objective is to develop a cloud-based system for near-real-time monitoring of soil moisture conditions over Austria at high spatio-temporal sampling (twice daily at 100 m sampling). The system will ingest Copernicus and EUMETSAT (European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites) data, estimate soil moisture from Sentinel-1 and ASCAT (Advanced Scatterometer), and integrate the satellite data with different land surface models to derive optimum soil moisture estimates at 100m.