North of the western Siberia: satellite monitoring of hydrological conditions

High-latitude terrestrial ecosystems respond to global climate changes through water, energy and gases exchange with the atmosphere and through freshwater input to the Arctic ocean. For the boreal river systems an estimation of various components of the water budget is necessary to improve our understanding of the processes involved, and the potential impact of climate variability and human activity on the functioning of the watersheds.
One of the key parameters of the water budget is the snow cover. Its contribution to the river outflow and its seasonal and interannual variability is very dynamic, and changes in snowmelt runoff will be one of the most pronounced hydrologic responses to climate change. The SSMI derived estimations of snow storage on the watersheds of the rivers Poluy, Nadym, Pur and Taz are found to be in good agreement with flood flow. On these watersheds up to 60 % of the melt waters can be storied in the bogs and thermokarst ponds resulting to they seasonal dynamic. This dynamic can be monitored by radar altimetry (TOPEX/Poseidon, Jason-1, ENVISAT missions) or by SAR (ENVISAT).
Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity mission (SMOS) lunched in the November 2009 will provide over land the spatial distribution of the soil moisture and vegetation parameters with resolution about 40 km. We present the first evaluation of the L1 product (brightness temperature) over northern part of the Western Siberia.


This research has been done in the framework of the Russian-French cooperation GDRI "CAR-WET-SIB", French ANR "CLASSIQUE" project and EU FP7 MONARCH-A project.