Novel use of advanced scatterometer (ASCAT) for forest fire monitoring

Fire both shapes and destroys forests. Forest fires are therefore essential to ecological processes and vegetation as we know them. With climate change, forest fires are expected to increase in severity and frequency. To maintain the functioning of the forests, it is important to understand the vegetation response to and recovery from forest...

Modeling C-band radar observables over sugarbeet fields using machine learning

This thesis developed a forward model for Sentinel-1 C-band co-pol and cross-pol backscatter and coherence using crop biophysical variables including leaf area index, tops weight, surface soil moisture and root zone soil moisture as inputs for sugarbeet. These input variables are simulated using a crop model called Decision Support System for...

The Potential of Satellite and Model Derived Variables for Rainfall-Induced Landslide Initiation Thresholds in Rwanda

Empirical-statistical rainfall landslide initiation thresholds are popularly used for early warning systems to discriminate between the occurrence and non-occurrence of rainfall-induced landslides. However, the few studies that have derived landslide initiation thresholds for landslide-prone and data-scarce Rwanda rely solely on the limited in...

Soccer Fields as Rainfall Detectors using Machine Learning: The case of Ghana

Agriculture is an important source of income for many countries in the Global South, where it may account for as much as 25% of GDP. Precipitation is crucial for agriculture in countries like Ghana, where ~95% of farming is rainfed. Accurate rainfall observations are limited in Ghana. The sparse rain gauge network and the lack of weather radars...

White Volta Water Retention: Thesis on the Impact of Constructing Multiple Small Dams on Floods and Sedimentation in Northern Ghana

Human interventions in the White Volta River in Ghana increase the flood risk in living spaces of the local communities, causing great challenges in the area. Burkina Faso has built a hydropower dam near the border with Ghana which has a large impact on the discharge extremes of the White Volta River. As a result of poor water management of this...

What is the potential of using Sentinel-1 and Sentinel-2 data to map farmer-led irrigated agriculture with machine learning?: 
A case study in Central Mozambique

Smallholder farmers cultivate more than 75% of the available agricultural land in Africa and therefore this form of agriculture is crucial to the global food supply. At present, little is known about these smallholder agricultural and related irrigation practices, yet the increasing availability and accessibility of remotely sensed data provides...

The Impact of Vegetation on the Partitioning of Evaporation in Conceptual Hydrological Models

Many conceptual hydrological models do not include any information on plant phenology, which represents the dynamic behavior of vegetation, to partition evaporation in a catchment. Such models often use potential evaporation to quantify evaporation from the interception reservoir and what remains afterward to quantify transpiration, or the other...

Regularizing GRACE mascon solutions using river run-off data

Accurate estimates of terrestrial water storage variations (TWSV) are critical for a variety of applications, e.g., model calibration and climate studies. This study aims to find the added value of river run-off data for regularizing GRACE mascon solution, from which TWSV can be estimated. Most subbasins of the Mississippi Basin show an...

Satellite Soil Moisture Retrieval: Validation and Analysis of Satellite Retrieved Soil Moisture in the Tropics, a case study in Myanmar

The validation of satellite retrieved soil moisture over a tropical region (Bago, Myanmar) has been conducted in this research. The downscaled soil moisture products of VanderSat using the Land Parameter Retrieval Model, were compared with an in-situ soil moisture network that operated between 2017 and 2018 and a newly placed network installed...

Detecting local surface motion of pas­tures on peat soils using laser scanning technology

Subsidence can be observed at various locations in the Netherlands. While it can be due to both shallow and deep subsurface processes, the shallow subsidence is mainly a result from compaction, oxidation and/or groundwater drainage. Moreover, for grasslands on organic soils, in particular pastures on drained peat soils, the vertical position of...

Estimating snow cover decline using the RSLE in Google Earth Engine: A Caucasus case study

Snow in mountainous areas is of great importance for the water supply in many catchments. To get data on snow cover, ground station data is not enough and, in many catchments, not available. Therefore, satellite data is used to measure snow cover. In this thesis the MODIS daily snow cover dataset (MOD10A1) is used. These images are obstructed by...