The Monitoring Soil Moisture using Earth Observation virtual workshop, held last week on 14 and 15 July, was a tremendous success, attracting interest from 173 delegates from 23 countries. Hosted by JNCC and made possible with funding from the Caroline Herschel Framework Partnership Agreement for Copernicus User Uptake, day one of the workshop delivered detailed information about the Surface Soil Moisture (SSM) and Soil Water Index (SWI) products from the Copernicus Global Land Service. Delegates benefited from an extended 'ask the expert' question-and-answer session and learned how to access and use these products and how they were validated from keynote speaker Dr Bernhard Bauer-Marschallinger of TU Wien, Vienna University of Technology (the lead author of the SWI and SSM documentation).
Day two featured the COSMOS-UK and Copernicus in Situ projects with Matt Fry from UKCEH and three international applications that use the SWI or SSM data; Open Big data and Precision Agriculture in the Agrosat project with Dr Riccardo Dainelli, IBE-CNR, the Institute of BioEconomy – National Research Council in Italy; Drought impact on Coffee plantations and Biodiversity on both sides of the Pacific Ocean with Fernando Roque of Quantic statistics in Guatemala; and Soil Moisture data use for environmental monitoring in Romania with Anisoara Irimescu of the National Meteorological Administration, Romania. To finish, a successful collaboration session was hosted online where delegates were asked to share knowledge, ideas and potential future work; many connections and proposals were initiated.
Workshop recordings and copies of the following presentations are available from our Resource Hub.
- Dr Gwawr Jones: Introduction to the Copernicus user Uptake Project and day 1 of the workshop
- Dr Bernhard Bauer-Marschallinger from TU Wien: Introduction to Copernicus soil moisture products SWI and SSM
- Matt Fry from UKCEH: COSMOS-UK and Copernicus in Situ
- Dr Riccardo Dainelli from IBE-CNR, the Institute of BioEconomy National Research Council in Italy: Agrosat, Open big data and precision agriculture
- Fernando Roque, Quantic Statistics in Guatemala: Drought impact on Coffee plantations and Biodiversity on both sides of the Pacific Ocean
- Anisoara Irimescu from National Meteorological Administration, Romania: Soil Moisture data use for environmental monitoring in Romania
Please visit our Copernicus User Uptake webpage for more information about other events and activities.