The new service named EGSIEM (European Gravity Service for Improved Emergency Management) will provide an improved forecast and mapping of hydrological extreme events, based on satellite generated gravity field data.
Within the project the German Aerospace Center (DLR) will perform retrospective comparative analyses of GRACE data and other earth observation data from past large flood events, in order to detect spatio-temporal correlation between the occurrence of large flood events and changes in the gravity field of the earth. At the moment test areas are being defined by searching several global earth observation initiatives such as the International Charter 'Space & Major Disasters' for very large flood events.
The findings shall then be integrated into the ZKI workflow to establish an early warning component, which can then be used for early stage satellite programming in case of emerging large scale flood events.
Besides improving the forecast of weather and climate events, EGSIEM will generally improve the usability of gravity field data in Earth and Environmental science and their temporal resolution.
