VanderSat stands for decades worth of scientific knowledge in the field of Earth Observation, with a strong focus on the global water cycle. Through our collaborations with some of the world’s leading institutions e.g. ESA, NASA, TU Delft, TU Wien, Ghent University, VU Amsterdam, World Bank, etc, we have been able to not just be up to date, but also to remain highly involved in the latest scientific developments.

Our scientific activities include studies at different spatial scales with passive microwave observations as the main driver. These studies include the production and analysis of long term climate data records of soil moisture and vegetation for the climate research community.  But also the use of earth observation to determine evaporation at fieldscale, and the ability to detect and quantify the effect of waterlogging in the agricultural sector.

Surface soil moisture covers only a miniscule amount of water compared to the total amount of available water on Earth, however due to its role as a key boundary condition in the interaction between the land and atmosphere, small changes therein can already have significant impacts. These impacts can be direct, like the available amount of water for plants to grow, or indirect, like the development of a heatwave. Think of topics like river run-off, floods, desertification, forest fires, droughts, vegetation health, evapotranspiration and precipitation. Or in other words, soil moisture is one of the primary drivers of the water, energy and carbon cycles. Therefore it is not surprising that soil moisture was officially recognized as an Essential Climate Variable (ECV) by the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) in 2010.

Urgent and beneficial to society

To support climate studies related to these topics, which are both urgent and beneficial to society, our data is available in the form of a coarse scale dataset (~25 km) through two scientific programmes; the Climate Change Initiative (CCI) by European Space Agency and the Copernicus Climate Change Services (C3S) by the European Commission. With over 9000 users, this dataset has already been a key resource for hundreds of climate studies across the globe. Among these are contributions to high profile publications like the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC) reports and the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS)’s yearly State of the Climate reports.

ESA CCI Soil Moisture data

The ESA CCI Soil Moisture data records are available at the ESA CCI soil moisture website and provides the following benefits:

• A yearly updated global climate data record of soil moisture spanning over 40 years (since 1978).
• Three separate soil moisture products derived from active, passive and combined (active + passive) sensors.
• Eight public releases to date, each updated with new sensors, improvements in retrieval algorithm, calibration and merging.

The C3S Soil Moisture data records are available at the Copernicus Climate website and provides the following benefits:

• A semi near-real-time soil moisture service with data being available with a ~15 day delay.
• Based on the ESA CCI Soil Moisture datasets, ~1 version behind in algorithm improvements.

The active datasets are generated by EUMETSAT H-SAF (ASCAT-A and -B) and the Microwave Remote Sensing Group at TU Wien (ERS data). All passive datasets within ESA CCI/C3S Soil Moisture are processed using the LPRMv6 algorithms, designed and implemented by VanderSat. The merging of the active and passive datasets is mostly done by the Microwave Remote Sensing Group at TU Wien.

For more information on our scientific research activities, please see the publications to view the scientific publications of our team.