Microwave remote sensing for agricultural drought monitoring: Recent developments and challenges

Agricultural droughts are extreme events which are often a result of interplays between multiple hydro-meteorological processes. Therefore, assessing drought occurrence, extent, duration and intensity is complex and requires the combined use of multiple variables, such as temperature, rainfall, soil moisture (SM) and vegetation state. The...

Perspective on satellite-based land data assimilation to estimate water cycle components in an era of advanced data availability and model sophistication

The beginning of the 21^st century is marked by a rapid growth of land surface satellite data and model sophistication. This offers new opportunities to estimate multiple components of the water cycle via satellite-based land data assimilation (DA) across multiple scales. By resolving more processes in land surface models and by...

Detecting forest response to droughts with global observations of vegetation water content

Droughts in a warming climate have become more common and more extreme, making understanding forest responses to water stress increasingly pressing. Analysis of water stress in trees has long focused on water potential in xylem and leaves, which influences stomatal closure and water flow through the soil-plant-atmosphere continuum. At the...

Surface and subsurface water from space: On the integration of microwave remote sensing observations with flood prediction systems

The technique of active microwave remote sensing has made much progress toward its high potential to monitor water storage changes in terrestrial surface and subsurface water bodies at various spatial and temporal scales. The number of studies demonstrating the support these data can offer in hydrological and hydraulic model building, model...