A Pre-operational Algorithm for the Retrieval of Snow Water Equivalent and Soil Moisture from Amsr-e Data

During the past decades, natural hazards such as floods, landslides and forest fires have caused major loss of human lives and the destruction of economic land social infrastructure, as well as environmental damages. The Italian National Project: PROSA (PRodotti di Osservazione Satellitari per l'Allerta Meteorologica) is a pilot project funded by the Italian Space Agency, which aims at contributing to civil protection from floods and landslides by developing a series of products derived from satellite sensors that can be useful in these dramatic events to permit immediate assessments of the areas at risk and/or aid decision-making on relief and clean-up operations. The products to be developed include two main groups: Precipitations and Land surface parameters (Soil moisture and Snow cover of bare and vegetated surfaces at different spatial scale and ground resolution). This work deals with mapping snow cover and water equivalent as well as soil moisture at low resolution from multifrequency microwave radiometers.