Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
• Enhanced ground water monitoring from satellite gravity observations,
• Enhanced monitoring of water quality, not only in coastal zones, but also over inland
water bodies and large rivers,
• Improved inputs from higher resolution space data for land snow- and ice inventories as
important water storage and frozen soil/permafrost monitoring,
• Inventories of data needed to do broad assessments of socio-economic trends of water
use (e.g., agricultural water demands),
• Improved assessment of the insights offered by the recent satellite monitoring of sea-
surface salinity regarding the oceanic branch of the hydrological cycle,
• Improved quantitative observation of river discharge,
• Enhanced monitoring of the surface albedo (from changes in snow, cover, sea ice
extent) and its influence on evaporation, cloud formation and precipitation.
The new generation of operational satellites is expected through their increased cov-
erage and temporal repeat observation capability to augment data availability and as such
further our understanding of the hydrological cycle, also helping to move towards a
quantitative closure of the water budget. Here, increased international collaboration and the
use of observations from many satellites and/or satellite constellations will constitute
important assets.
Acknowledgments The authors gratefully acknowledge the contributions by Florian Appel, Heike Bach,
Marcela Doubkova, Diego Fern´ndez-Prieto, Paul Ingmann, Roberto Sabia and Tobias Wehr.
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