HSAF precipitation products
Federico Porcu gives an overview on the Hydro-SAF precipitation products.
Length: 49 min
Author: Federico Porcu (University of Bologna)
The Satellite Application Facility for supporting operational hydrology and water management (H-SAF), established in 2005 as part of the EUMETSAT SAF network, is designed to provide the user community with new satellite-derived products from existing and future satellites with sufficient time and space resolution to satisfy the needs of operational hydrology. Three hydrological variables are considered(soil moisture, snow at the ground and precipitation) and a number of related parameters are made available to the user community, with a quantitative description of their accuracy.
Precipitation products are derived from algorithms based on different satellite data (active and passive microwave, visible/infra-red) and approaches (artificial neural network, Bayesian statistics, pattern recognition) to provide the most advanced set of precipitation product over Europe, and, in the next future, over Africa. The use of H-SAF precipitation products to study the severe meteorological events occurred in Italy in the autumn 2014 showed their potential as additional tools in monitoring heavy rainfall, especially in cases when conventional, ground-based instruments are not able to fully describe the precipitation pattern and intensity.