A new rainfall record in March was followed by a very dry April with record sunshine hours.

Recent weather patterns in Denmark is giving us an opportunity to show you how satellites can be used to extract soil #moisture from the Sentinel-1 radar satellites.

Using cloud-penetrating Sentinel-1 observations we were able to get almost daily soil moisture measurements in both months, despite March having only 119 sunshine hours compared to 274 hours in April.

The images show the monthly average surface soil moisture for March and April this year and clearly illustrates the unusually wet and dry conditions compared to previous years.

DID YOU KNOW?

Soil moisture is a key variable to understand many environmental processes such as vegetation health, #drought and #flood risks and plays a large role in climate models.

Changes in soil moisture of the top few centimeters of soil, greatly influences the characteristics of the soil, which makes it possible to measure with radar instruments mounted on satellites.

DHI GRAS is working together with DHI on assimilating satellite based soil moisture observations into complex hydrological models.