Abstract
In this paper we explore the performances and the opportunities provided by the European satellite Sentinel-1 for water resource management applications in low-income countries. The analysis is supported by a synthetic aperture radar (SAR) simulator, which allowed the quantification of the expected characteristics of Sentinel-1 products in three applications: interferometric digital elevation models (DEMs) generation, land cover mapping and estimation of water volumes retained by small reservoirs. The obtained results quantitatively show that Sentinel-1 data characteristics are fully suitable for most of the application already explored in the recent SAR literature.
Highlights
The United Nations estimated that, by 2025, 1.8 billion people will live in regions characterized by water scarcity and two-thirds of the world’s population will be faced with a lack of water [1]
In order to evaluate the potentiality of Sentinel-1 in measuring water volumes in semi-arid regions, we compared a series of simulated COSMO-SkyMed images superimposed to a 9 m spatial resolution digital elevation models (DEMs) and a series of simulated Sentinel-1 images superimposed to a 15 m spatial resolution DEM for different levels of the water contour height
In this paper we explored the potentiality of the Sentinel-1 mission in providing data and value-added information for water resource management applications
Summary
The United Nations estimated that, by 2025, 1.8 billion people will live in regions characterized by water scarcity and two-thirds of the world’s population will be faced with a lack of water [1]. A complete and up-to-date catalog of location and maximum capacity of the reservoirs is not available, even because they are often built by an initiative of farmers’ associations, without general planning In this context, remote sensing could be a powerful instrument, allowing a strong reduction of costs and time necessary to obtain relevant information for an effective management of water resources. These relations are extremely useful since they allow for the extraction of the available water volume through the estimation of a reservoir’s surface This activity can be successfully carried out with remotely sensed data, thereby avoiding expensive bathymetric surveys.
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