MIDA

Research and development project, co-funded by the Italian Space Agency (ASI), MIDA (Mappe IDrologiche Assimilate) was aimed at the synergistic use of EO and model data to produce physically based soil moisture maps at the national (Italian) scale. Among the available EO data, Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data were chosen because of their all-weather capability, their sensitivity to water and the high spatial resolution of the soil moisture maps that can be produced using SAR data (0.5x0.5 km2). The idea behind the activity was that hydrological models are capable of representing catchment conditions, including soil moisture, at fine spatial and temporal resolution. However, the underlying uncertainties can be large. On the other hand, the SAR retrieval of surface soil moisture is also subject to uncertainties, for example due to the well-known ill-posedness of the retrieval problem. In addition, SAR has a limited swath, so daily SAR-derived soil moisture maps have many gaps. Therefore, the idea of integrating satellite-based data (observations) with the physical modelling of hydrological processes through data assimilation, which allows the combination of different sources of information (with different levels of uncertainty), aims at obtaining a combined improved product affected by less uncertainty.

FadeOut Software role

FadeOut Software contributed to the analysis, design, and development phases of MIDA. Our team supported requirement analysis and data workflow definition, designed integration strategies between SAR observations and hydrological model outputs, and developed software components for data ingestion, processing, and validation to support the generation of national-scale soil moisture products.