Soil moisture droughts evaluated using earth observation

Summary

Droughts happen more often and become more severe over Europe due to climate change. They can take place in different parts of the water cycle, like surface water, groundwater, or soil moisture. Their occurrence can have immense impacts on the environment and on society. Minimising these impacts is only possible if the drought is accurately monitored.

In my PhD research I used satellite soil moisture data for drought monitoring. Such datasets have a large coverage, but often suffer from a coarse spatial resolution. My research describes how to obtain satellite soil moisture data with a finer spatial resolution. Field soil moisture measurements helped validating these fine resolution satellite data. Finally, we showed that the data could be used for drought monitoring on field scales. This increases the data's relevance for agricultural water management and irrigation planning.