The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME) have signed a cooperation agreement on the validation of satellite soil moisture measurement data, the university announced on Wednesday.
As part of the partnership, experts from BME’s Faculty of Civil Engineering will participate in verifying the accuracy of soil moisture maps obtained from NASA’s SMAP space probe and the U.S.-Indian NISAR radar Earth observation satellite launched last year. Microwave space probes enable continuous monitoring of the top layer of the Earth’s surface, including soil moisture measurement, which is crucial for drought management and irrigation planning.
Zsófia Kugler, head of the Department of Photogrammetry and Geoinformatics at BME, emphasized in the announcement that, as part of the collaboration, data from space will be compared with ground measurements to minimize errors.
The partnership may become even closer in the future, but this would require an intergovernmental research funding framework, that unfortunately does not currently exist between the United States and Hungary,”
she added.
According to the announcement, monitoring soil moisture is also extremely important, because the latest research shows that heat waves can only occur where the soil moisture content falls below a certain level. Thus, these satellite data also play a prominent role in weather forecasting.
The scientific collaboration was established as a result of a summer university held at BME a year and a half ago. NASA and BME plan to develop a training program for European researchers in the future as part of the partnership.
Via MTI, Featured image: Pexels
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