The EUMETSAT Satellite Application Facility (SAF) on support to operational hydrology and water management (H-SAF) was established by the EUMETSAT Council in July 2005 and the Development phase started on 1st September 2005.
H-SAF membership includes 12 EUMETSAT member or cooperating States (Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Turkey) and ECMWF. The H-SAF is hosted by the Italian Met Service.
In the framework of the H-SAF the interest for new satellite products focuses on:
- Precipitation rate and cumulate precipitation, including liquid/solid discrimination;
- Soil moisture in the surface layer and possibly in the roots region;
- Snow parameters such as effective cover, wet/dry discrimination, water equivalent.
ECMWF is a contributor to the core soil moisture product and is represented in the H-SAF Steering Group and the Project Team.
Visiting Scientist reports:
- Gruhier C., Albergel C., de Rosnay P., Hasenauer S., Zeiner B., 2010: "Comparison between H-SAF large scale surface soil moisture, H-SAF assimilated soil moisture and SMOS level 2 soil moisture". (H-SAF_CDOP_VS11_02.pdf)
- Pellarin T., de Rosnay P., Albergel C., Abdalla S., Al Bitar A., 2013: "Root-zone soil moisture index complementary validation at global scale based on triple collocation method. Comparison with State-Of-The-Art global scale root-zone soil moisture products." (H-SAF_CDOP2_VS12_02.pdf)
ECMWF H-SAF products:
- SM-DAS-2 (H14): ASCAT near-real-time root zone product description and previews
- How to read SM-DAS-2 and SM-DAS-3
- converting grib to regular netCDF files
Converting grib to netCDF with CDO:
- - The following examples use the CDO tool, which is free to download from:
https://code.mpimet.mpg.de/projects/cdo - - In the terminal, we will convert the grib file from reduced Gaussian to regular lat/lon. In order to this we need to know the number of regular latitude points correspoding to the linear reduced Gaussian grid (T799~N400), which can be found at:
https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/documentation-and-support/gaussian_n400 - - Given there are 1600 regular latitude points (and 800 longitude points), we can convert our reduced Gaussian grid to regular lat/lon:
module load cdo
- To convert to regular lat/lon
cdo -R remapcon,r1600x800 -setgridtype,regular h14_2019053000.grib h14_2019053000_r.grib
- Then convert the file from grib to netcdf:
cdo -f nc copy h14_2019053000_r.grib h14_2019053000.nc
- Then extract the Italian domain from the global netcdf file (lon0=5, lon1=19, lat0=36, lat1=48):
cdo -sellonlatbox,5,19,36,48 h14_2019053000.nc h14_2019053000_Italy.nc
#Note that the size of the file is vastly reduced (h14_2019053000.nc ~ 25 mb, h14_2019053000_Italy.nc ~ 70 kb)!
- Size of netCDF files can be further reduced by compression e.g.
cdo -f nc4c -z zip_6 copy h14_2019053000_r.grib h14_2019053000_compressed.nc
- - The following examples use the CDO tool, which is free to download from:
- SM-DAS-2 / H14 documentation:
- Product User Manual (SAF_HSAF_PUM-14.pdf)
- Algorithm Theoretical Baseline Document (SAF_HSAF_ATBD-14_0_2.pdf)
- Product Validation Report (SAF_HSAF_PVR-14.pdf)
- Data Output Format (SAF_HSAF_DOF_H14_v1.2.pdf)