Advanced multi-temporal passive microwave data analysis for soil wetness monitoring and flood risk forecast

Microwave remote sensing offers emerging capabilities to monitor soil moisture variations at global scale. The Robust Satellite Techniques (RST), a general change detection methodology, has been applied using Advance Microwave Sounding Unit (AMSU) data to define a new Soil Wetness Variation Index (SWI), which has already demonstrated its capabilities in monitoring soil wetness variations in the space-time domain. In this work, the RST approach has been implemented also using AMSR-E (Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer - Earth Observing System) C-band data, trying to exploit its better spectral features in order to define a new advanced index able to give suitable information about soil moisture and its variation. In particular, the flooding event which hit the Algeria in October 2008 has been analyzed by such an index as well by using SWVI. Results of such a study will be shown and discussed in this work.