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A. Bartsch:
"Soil moisture monitoring for Sustainable Water Resources Management in southern Africa.";
Talk: US-IALE 23rd Annual Landscape Ecology Symposium - Landscape Patterns and Ecosystem Processes, Madison, Wisconsin (invited); 2008-04-06 - 2008-04-10; in: "US-IALE 2008 Abstract Book.", (2008), 33.

Soil moisture is a crucial parameter for hydrological modeling and crop yield prediction. It reflects soil properties as well as hydrometeorological conditions. A processing chain for soil moisture from active microwave satellite data (C-band Synthetic Aperture Radar and Scatterometer) was setup within the ESA Tiger DUE Innovator project SHARE for hydrometeorological applications. The SHARE project introduces an operational soil moisture monitoring service for the region of the Southern African Development Community (SADC, 10 million km˛). With this service SHARE addresses one of today´s most severe obstacles in water resource management which is the lack of availability of reliable soil moisture information on a dynamic basis at a frequency of a week and less. The long-term vision of SHARE is to supply soil moisture information for the entire African continent, at a resolution of 1 km, posted on the web, freely accessible to all. The medium resolution (1 km) soil moisture indicator is solely based on the European ENVISAT ASAR instrument (operating in global mode, available since December 2004) and has been developed using a change detection algorithm. More than 2000 maps have been derived for the first two years of data availability. Additionally SHARE provides access to a coarse resolution (50 km) soil moisture product from ERS scatterometers (1992-2000) together with a scaling layer (based on ENVISAT data) which enables interpretation of the coarse resolution soil moisture product at 1 km resolution. Metop ASCAT (25 km) allows a continuation of the coarse resolution soil moisture information globally since 2007 and will be provided in NRT (near real time) via EUMETCast in the near future. The long time series allow the identification and monitoring of anomalies which are associated with flooding and drought.

Active microwave satellite data, Drought, Flooding, Soil moisture, Water management