Resolving the Daily Water Cycle over Land with Radar Satellites
FFG Cooperative R&D project 
Period: 2019 – 2021 (20 months)
Partners: The consortium is leaded by TUWien (Austria) with the collaboration of other 2 partners:
- IRPI CNR: Istituto di Ricerca per la Protezione Idrogeologica (Prime contractor)
- Earth Observation Data Centre (EODC)
Description: G-Class, a geosynchronous C-band radar satellite designed for monitoring the daily water cycle, was recently selected by ESA as one of its three Earth Explorer 10 candidate missions. To contribute to Phase 0 of this mission, the goal of the DWC-Radar project is to exploit the first-time availability of five contemporary European C-band radar instruments in space to develop sub-daily backscatter time series and retrieve soil moisture at 1km resolution. The main benefits of the availability of sub-daily soil moisture time series will be demonstrated in downstream products by improving rainfall retrievals from soil moisture using SM2RAIN and in three applications that are of ultimate importance to civil security: the estimation of irrigation water use, flood forecasting, and landslide risk prediction. The outputs of soil moisture and rainfall will be validated with in situ and model data.