![]() ![]() To retrieve soil moisture data from ASCAT, Wagner’s team develops algorithms that filter soil moisture data from other features that impact the ‘backscatter’ from the satellite’s microwave signal, such as the roughness of the land surface, vegetation such as crops and forests, and concrete in urban areas. If we can better understand the correlations and get this information to authorities quicker, then it could help community response.” “For example, in our analysis of the Pakistan floods, we saw in our ASCAT soil moisture data that soils were saturated long before the flooding. With the help of the Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT) onboard EUMETSAT’s Metop polar-orbiting satellites we can produce soil moisture maps within around two hours after sensing. “Knowing the soil’s wetness or dryness can make important contributions to understanding the likelihood of floods or drought in a particular area. “Soil moisture accounts for just a minor fraction of the world’s water resources, yet it has substantial influence on air temperature, humidity, rainfall, and other highly dynamic exchanges between the land and lower atmosphere,” says Wagner, whose team contributes to EUMETSAT’s Satellite Application Facility on Support to Operational Hydrology and Water Management (H SAF). Wagner says that efforts to better monitor and predict floods can benefit from observations of other key variables relating to the water cycle, such as the water within snow, vegetation and soil. “I was completely dumbfounded.”Īs the major component of the water cycle, rainfall is the most critical and direct cause of flood disasters. “The 2022 Pakistan floods were off the scale compared to any flood event I had seen before,” says Wagner, Professor of Remote Sensing, whose team develop physical approaches that help decipher remote sensing data related to the water cycle. ![]() ![]() Communities in affected regions continue to face humanitarian emergencies. It was one of the costliest natural disasters ever recorded. More than 1700 people were killed, 33 million affected, and more than two million homes were damaged or destroyed. Large swaths of land continued to be submerged by flood waters even months after the event. The post-flood analysis showed that at their peak, the massive floods submerged an area the size of Belgium – some 30,000km 2. Cue the wanderlust.When Dr Wolfgang Wagner first saw the extent of open waters when mapping Pakistan’s devastating 2022 floods using radar images from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite, he thought that there must have been something wrong with the data.īut after his team triple-checked the data and algorithms used to detail the evolution of the floods as part of a new Copernicus service to improve flood monitoring, Wagner – who is based at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien), Austria – realised that the data were telling the dramatic story of an unprecedented catastrophe. Want to stay close to home? Honeymoon a la JFK and Jackie Kennedy in a delightful celebrity's refuge in Santa Barbara. Prefer to just sprawl out on pristine sand for a week? We've got a sampling of fabulous private islands around the world. Have a thirst for adventure? Consider a 10-day trek across the Serengeti, on foot. To ease the stress of planning the perfect post-nuptial trip, we've rounded up dozens of T&C-approved honeymoon destinations, plus the best places to stay in each. Just as weddings have become ever more extravagant over the years, so have honeymoons-why take one week when you can take off three? And why settle for one destination when you can combine multiple stops? Tanzania and Tuscany, anyone? Patagonia and Fiji? And given you'll only do it once (in theory, at least) there is inevitably a lot of pressure to make this extremely special. The honeymoon is one of those high-stakes trips that requires careful and thoughtful planning, not to mention a well-padded budget. ![]()
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