Hydrology

EOMAP's Hydrology service supplies satellite-derived data products for catchment-scale hydrological modelling, water-resource management and flood-risk work, where in-situ gauges are sparse or costly to run. The suite covers near-real-time flood extent and depth from SAR imagery supplied by partner ICEYE; river water level and discharge, derived by combining satellite altimetry for water levels with optical imagery for river width; river velocity, width and depth; surface-water extent and reservoir storage changes, computed by overlaying water-extent maps from several dates on a digital terrain model; sediment fluxes from discharge combined with satellite-derived turbidity; and hydrologically conditioned DEMs with derivatives such as flow direction, flow accumulation, watershed basins and the Topographic Wetness Index.

Snow depth and daily snow water equivalent at 500 m resolution come from SnowPower: partner Snowcap retrieves snow depth from Sentinel-1 radar data, which feeds a physics-based snow model. SnowPower was developed under ESA's Business Applications and Space Solutions programme and is in a demonstration phase funded by the Enel Group for its Alpine and Apennine hydropower plants.

Raster products are OGC-conform and open in any GIS, and can be viewed in EOMAP's eoapp web applications; SnowPower adds daily monitoring subscriptions and e-mail alerts when user-defined thresholds are exceeded. In an ESA-funded project, EOMAP delivered daily discharge estimates at seven locations on the Zambezi for the Zambezi Watercourse Commission (ZAMCOM), and Reuters built its Mekong sediment story on EOMAP's sediment flux data. EOMAP is a Fugro company.