Raffaele Crapolicchio - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Raffaele Crapolicchio

To this day, in situ soil moisture data is viewed as ground truth by the satelli... more To this day, in situ soil moisture data is viewed as ground truth by the satellite soil moisture (SSM) community. In general, little is still commonly known regarding the traceability of ground measurement uncertainty and their overall in uncertainty budget, which can impact satellite SSM product quality assessments. Within ESA&#8217;s &#8220;Fiducial Reference Measurement for Soil Moisture (FRM4SM, May 2021 - May 2023)&#8221; project, objectives are set towards building fully characterized and traceable (i.e., fiducial) in situ measurements following community-agreed guidelines from the GEOS/CEOS Quality Assurance for Soil Moisture (QA4EO) framework. These so called &#8220;fiducial reference data&#8221; (FRM) should have associated Quality Indicators (QI) attached to evaluate their fitness for purpose building upon agreed reference standards (SI if possible). Moreover, such data should be easily and openly accessible, validation case studies should demonstrate their utility and reliability, and protocols and procedures should be established for the usage of such FRM datasets to make scientific studies intercomparable and reproducible. As part of the FRM4SM project, the following questions were addressed using the International Soil Moisture Network (ISMN) as a ground reference database and the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission as an example satellite product: (1) What makes &#8220;fiducial reference data&#8221; fiducial? (2) Is the creation of a globally-representative FRM subset already feasible for SSM? (3) What are the current limitations of in situ observations that limit fiduciality? (4) What is needed to create a full traceability chain from in situ point measurements to the satellite footprint scale? In this presentation, we will discuss these questions in detail and report on related findings of the FRM4SM project.

Space Weather

Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) is an ESA mission observing Earth at 1.4 GHz with full po... more Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) is an ESA mission observing Earth at 1.4 GHz with full polarimetry. SMOS images are affected by a noise of solar origin produced by the Sun appearing in the antenna's field of view. In this paper, we study whether this solar signal is of any use for scientific and space weather observations. We analyze the response of the SMOS Sun brightness temperature (BT) to thermal and nonthermal solar emissions, and compare them with observations from ground radio telescopes, GOES X‐ray flares, and CMEs from SOHO/LASCO. We find that the SMOS Sun BT can detect weak variations in the solar emission such as the progress of the 11‐year activity cycle, the solar rotation, and the thermal emission from flares. Solar radio bursts detected by the SMOS Sun BT are generally observed during flares from the visible hemisphere of the Sun that are associated with a CME. We also find a correlation between the amount of solar flux released at 1.4 GHz and the speed, angular width, and kinetic energy of the CMEs. We conclude that the unique capability of the SMOS mission to perform 24 h near real‐time observation of the Sun with full polarimetry makes it a promising instrument for monitoring solar interferences affecting GNSS, radar, and L‐band wireless communications, as well as for early assessment of flares geoeffectiveness. Nevertheless, the current limitations of the solar data as byproduct of the SMOS data reduction pipeline make it necessary to create a dedicated product for solar observations.

&... more The aim of this presentation is to report on recent advances concerning the satellite based soil moisture validation done through the ESA project &#8220;Fiducial Reference Measurement for Soil Moisture (FRM4SM)&#8221;. The main objective of this two years project (May 2021 - May 2023) is to study the means to inform on the confidence in soil moisture data products for the whole duration of a satellite mission. Composed of three international partners (AWST, CESBIO and TU WIEN), it aims at the identification and creation of standards for independent, fully characterized, accurate and traceable (i.e., fiducial) in situ soil moisture reference measurements with corresponding independent validation methods and uncertainty estimations for a satellite mission. The ground reference data is drawn from the International Soil Moisture Network (ISMN). New quality indicators are created to better characterize the aptness of ISMN measurements for satellite soil moisture validation, and protocols provided to identify a select set of fiducial reference data. The satellite part, in charge of independent validation methods, focuses efforts towards the Soil Moisture Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission from ESA. Finally, the easy-to-use interface for the comparison of satellite soil moisture data against land surface models and in situ data, the Quality Assurance for Soil Moisture (QA4SM), targets to implement all created FRM protocols from ground measurement to validation methods created within the FRM4SM project. &#160;

Consiglio nazionale delle ricerche (Italia), Nov 17, 2020

16th Specialist Meeting on on Microwave Radiometry and Remote Sensing of the Environment, 16-20 N... more 16th Specialist Meeting on on Microwave Radiometry and Remote Sensing of the Environment, 16-20 November 202

Mecklenburg, S. .. et. al.-- Satellite soil moisture validation & application workshop, 10 - 11 J... more Mecklenburg, S. .. et. al.-- Satellite soil moisture validation & application workshop, 10 - 11 July 2014, Amsterdam, the Netherland

IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing

&lt;p&gt;With its steadily growing provider and user community (4000 active users... more &lt;p&gt;With its steadily growing provider and user community (4000 active users), the International Soil Moisture Network (ISMN, https://ismn.earth)&amp;#160; is a unique centralized global data hosting facility, making in-situ soil moisture data easily and freely accessible.&amp;#160;&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The main goal of the ISMN in the past decade was to build up the harmonized and quality-controlled in-situ soil moisture source it is today.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The ISMN provides benchmark data for several operational services such as ESA CCI Soil Moisture, the Copernicus Climate Change (C3S) and Global Land Service (CGLS), and the online validation tool QA4SM (https://qa4sm.eu). ISMN data is widely used for support of algorithm development and validation of different satellites, evaluation of soil moisture products, as a training set for various data-driven approaches, model developments, drought monitoring and diverse meteorological applications (Dorigo et. al 2021).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;In this presentation, we will provide an overview of the ISMN scientific achievements accomplished in the last decade, show recent scientific and service developments, and present foreseen future developments.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;We provide a review of hundreds of papers making use of ISMN data to identify major scientific breakthroughs facilitated through the ISMN. We also identify current limitations in data availability, functionality and challenges in data usage (e.g., in-situ data inclusion in data sparse regions, in-situ data inclusion from official governmental observation networks, data and measurement traceability, etc.).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;One of the major successes has been the achievement of long-term financial support for the ISMN through the German Ministry of Digital Infrastructure and Transport. Therefore, the ISMN operations is currently transferred from Vienna Austria (TU Wien) to the new host in Koblenz, Germany (International Center for Water Resources and Climate Change - ICWRGC, Federal Institute for Hydrology &amp;#8211; BfG).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;This evolution not only opens up a stable future for the ISMN but also gives TU Wien once more the opportunity to focus on the scientific development of the ISMN as currently proceeded within the ESA project &amp;#8220;Fiducial Reference Measurement for Soil Moisture (FRM4SM)&amp;#8221;. &amp;#160;Within this two-year project (May 2021 &amp;#8211; May 2023) the goal is also to identify and create standards for independent, fully characterized, accurate and traceable in-situ soil moisture measurements (from the ISMN) with corresponding uncertainty estimations and independent validation methods (inserted in the QA4SM service: https://qa4sm.eu).&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;&amp;#160;&lt;/p&gt;

List of solar radio bursts (1.4 GHz) in the SMOS v621 data with peak Sun brightness temperature 1... more List of solar radio bursts (1.4 GHz) in the SMOS v621 data with peak Sun brightness temperature 10^5 K above the local background and associated X-ray flare, if any. Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) is a mission of the European Space Agency (ESA).

All in-text references underlined in blue are linked to publications on ResearchGate, letting you... more All in-text references underlined in blue are linked to publications on ResearchGate, letting you access and read them immediately.

&lt;p&gt;The International Soil Moisture Network (ISMN, https://ismn.earth) is in... more &lt;p&gt;The International Soil Moisture Network (ISMN, https://ismn.earth) is international cooperation to establish and maintain a unique centralized global data hosting facility, making in-situ soil moisture data easily and freely accessible (Dorigo et al., 2021). Initiated in 2009 as a community effort through international cooperation (ESA, GEWEX, GTN-H, GCOS, TOPC, HSAF, QA4SM, C3S, etc.), the ISMN is an essential means for validating and improving global satellite soil moisture products, land surface-, climate-, and hydrological models.&amp;#160;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;The ISMN is a widely used, reliable, and consistent in-situ data source (surface and sub-surface) collected by a myriad of data organizations on a voluntary basis. &amp;#160;The in-situ soil moisture measurements are collected, harmonized in terms of units and sampling rates, advanced quality control is applied and the data is then stored in a database and made available online, where users can download it for free. Currently, 71 networks are participating with more than 2800 stations distributed on a global scale and a steadily increasing number of user communities. Long term time series with mainly hourly timestamps from 1952 &amp;#8211; up to near-real-time are stored in the database, including daily near-real-time updates. Besides soil moisture in our database are stored other meteorological variables as well (air temperature, soil temperature, precipitation, snow depth, etc.).&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;The ISMN provides benchmark data for several operational services such as ESA CCI Soil Moisture, the Copernicus Climate Change (C3S) and Global Land Service (CGLS), and the online validation tool QA4SM. ISMN data is widely used in a variety of scientific fields (e.g., climate, water, agriculture, disasters, ecosystems, weather, biodiversity, etc).&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;To validate the land surface representations of meteorological forecasting models soil moisture from the ISMN has often been used. The development of various generations of TESSEL models used both in the Integrated Forecasting Systems and reanalysis products of ECMWF, greatly profited from soil moisture and temperature data from the ISMN. Using ISMN data several studies assessed the soil moisture skill of the Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF) and assessed the forecast skill or new implementations of numerical weather prediction models.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;We greatly acknowledge the financial support provided by ESA through various projects: SMOSnet International Soil Moisture Network, IDEAS+, and QA4EO.&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;To ensure a long-term funding for the ISMN operations, several ideas were perused together with ESA. A partner for this task could be found within the International Center for Water Resources and Global Change (ICWRGC) hosted by the German Federal Institute of Hydrology (BfG).&amp;#160;&lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;In this session, we want to give an overview and future outlook of the ISMN, highlighting its unique features and discuss challenges in supporting the hydrological research community in need of freely available, standardized, and quality-controlled datasets.&amp;#160;&lt;/p&gt;

IGARSS 2019 - 2019 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, 2019

ESA’s Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission [1] has been in orbit for over 9 years, and... more ESA’s Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission [1] has been in orbit for over 9 years, and its Microwave Imaging Radiometer with Aperture Synthesis (MIRAS) in two dimensions is working well. The data products are generated using version v620 of the Level-1 operational processor, a version which entered into operation in Spring 2015. During last year a comprehensive data set was processed using a new processor version v720 and the assessment of the results is expected to be completed by mid 2019. In parallel to this evaluation of v720, the following version v730 of the Level-1 processor of SMOS has been already produced. This latter version is intended for investigating the capability to reduce Radio Frequency Interferences (RFI) by applying image processing techniques. This paper describes the major features and status of the two mentioned versions of the SMOS Level-1 processor, and importantly, aims at updating the remote sensing community on those aspects of the SMOS mission.

IGARSS 2018 - 2018 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, 2018

ESA's Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission [1] has been in orbit for over 8 years,... more ESA's Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission [1] has been in orbit for over 8 years, and its Microwave Imaging Radiometer with Aperture Synthesis (MIRAS) in two dimensions is working well. The data for this whole period has been and is being processed with the operational version of the current Level-l processor (version v620). Also a representative part of the same data set has been processed with a working version of a new processor (v720) which is now in preparation so that homogenous records of brightness temperatures have been made available. These rich and long data records have allowed learning important lessons from the in-flight experience, and shall eventually lead into the consolidation of the new Level-l processor version (v720) with its corresponding auxiliary calibration and configuration files. Once the improvements are confirmed the new processor version shall be recommended for the operational chain.

IGARSS 2018 - 2018 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, 2018

Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) is an Earth Explorer European Space Agency (ESA) mission ... more Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) is an Earth Explorer European Space Agency (ESA) mission launched in November 2009, in excellent operational status with plans to continue its operational phase beyond 2019. The payload of SMOS consists of the Microwave Imaging Radiometer using Aperture Synthesis (MIRAS) instrument, a passive microwave 2-D interferometric full polarization radiometer, operating at 1.413 GHz (wavelength of 21 cm). Due to the orbit geometry and the size of the MIRAS's antennae the Sun appears in the antenna field of view and direct Solar radio observation is captured by MIRAS. The retrieved L-band Sun brightness temperature is a valuable signal that can be further used for research in the fields of solar observation and space weather. The paper presents the preliminary results of a comparison exercise between estimated Sun brightness temperature from SMOS images (processor version v720) and various ground-based radio-telescope measurements: from the Humain s...

The Instrument Data quality Evaluation and Analysis Service (IDEAS) provides operational quality ... more The Instrument Data quality Evaluation and Analysis Service (IDEAS) provides operational quality control for ESA satellite missions such as ERS, ENVISAT, Earth Explorers, and some selected ESA Third Party Missions like Landsat or MODIS. The IDEAS team works in close collaboration with different ESA entities, external scientific groups and industrial partners in order to accomplish the quality objectives. The quality monitoring task is an on-going activity, which is continuously improving, with the purpose to ensure that all quality requirements are met. The goal is to provide users with the best quality of data during near real-time processing of the mission and on mission reprocessed data sets. The information generated by IDEAS is accessible to users for example via routinely produced reports that also contain important information related to calibration and validation activities. In this paper we show the principles of the IDEAS Quality Control activities, using a particular exam...

This paper describes the first outcomes of an activity aiming at validating the H-SAF soil moistu... more This paper describes the first outcomes of an activity aiming at validating the H-SAF soil moisture products derived from METOP-ASCAT data. For this purpose, an extensive comparison between SMOS and ASCAT derived soil moisture retrievals has been accomplished by considering the 25 km resolution ASCAT products and the SMOS level 2 products. Both Europe and Northern Africa have been considered and data acquired during 2010 have been used. The procedure that has been followed to accomplish the comparison is described together with the first results. The way the ASCAT soil moisture relative index has been converted into a volumetric moisture content, which represents a critical aspect of the comparison, is also described. Results have demonstrated that, after the conversion of the H-SAF estimates into absolute volumetric soil moisture, the two products show a fairly good degree of correlation. Additional factors, such as spatial property features are also preliminary investigated.

2017 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), 2017

The triple collocation (TC) technique is being increasingly used to validate soil moisture retrie... more The triple collocation (TC) technique is being increasingly used to validate soil moisture retrievals derived from different sensors. In recent years, several extensions of this method were proposed in order to evaluate the error standard deviations of more than three systems. As the number of datasets grows the TC fundamental hypothesis, i.e. the absence of cross-correlation between the system errors, could be violated. In this paper, an Extended Quadruple Collocation (E-QC) is proposed to consider the presence of the error cross-correlation between soil moisture products, identifying automatically the couple of cross-correlated systems. The method is applied to soil moisture retrievals provided by satellite (SMOS, ASCAT, SMAP), model (ERAInterim) and in situ probes (ISMN). The method identified the presence of error cross-correlation between the satellite products and was able to correctly retrieve the system errors, otherwise biased if cross-correlation is not taken into account.

IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing, 2017

2016 14th Specialist Meeting on Microwave Radiometry and Remote Sensing of the Environment (MicroRad), 2016

In this work, two remotely sensed soil moisture data sets, derived by the Advaced SCATterometer (... more In this work, two remotely sensed soil moisture data sets, derived by the Advaced SCATterometer (ASCAT) and the Soil Moisture Ocean Salinity (SMOS), have been compared with the soil moisture provided by the ERA/Interim Land data sets and measured by the in situ probes belonging to the International Soil Moisture Network (ISMN). The Triple Collocation (TC) represents a very useful tool for validating remotely sensed products; in this work, since four sources have been considered, a Quadruple Collocation (QC) approach has been also applied in order to jointly estimate the error standard deviation of the four sources making reference to a common scale as for its magnitude. Both Europe and North Africa were considered during a period starting from June, 2010 to May, 2014. Moreover, the preliminary results of a TC analysis between SMOS, ASCAT and SMAP (Soil Moisture Active/Passive) soil moisture products are shown for the same region of interest considering a period between April and December, 2015 .

Space Weather

Consiglio nazionale delle ricerche (Italia), Nov 17, 2020

IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing

IGARSS 2019 - 2019 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, 2019

IGARSS 2018 - 2018 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, 2018

2017 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium (IGARSS), 2017

IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing, 2017

2016 14th Specialist Meeting on Microwave Radiometry and Remote Sensing of the Environment (MicroRad), 2016