An Earth System Digital Twin (ESDT) is a dynamic, interactive, digital replica of the state and temporal evolution of Earth systems. It integrates multiple models along with observations, and connecting them with analysis, AI, and visualization tools. Together, these enable users to explore the current state of the Earth system, predict future conditions, and run hypothetical scenarios to understand how the system would evolve under various assumptions.Since 2021, NASA’s Advanced Information Systems Technology (AIST) program has invested in two ESDT efforts to tackle the impacts of our changing climate. The establishment of ESDT for flood and air quality enabled our teams to formalize the software framework. The open-source framework is called the Integrated Digital Earth Analysis System (IDEAS). By working with the Apache Science Data Analytics Platform (SDAP) community, IDEAS is now a subproject of SDAP. The paper presents the ongoing development of IDEAS and its current applications.

As a result of climate change, extreme hydrometeorological events are becoming increasingly frequent. Over the past 20 years, more than 2 billion people have been exposed to consequences of fluvial floods. Flood detection, rapid mapping and risk assessment products play an important role in flood emergency response and management. Within this context, FloodDAM-Digital Twin is a pre-operational prototype which provides an automated service to reliably detect, monitor, assess and predict floods at local and global scale within digital twin Franco-American collaboration. At the end of the project, a proof of concept demonstration will be realized over French and USA selected catchments. This prototype could be commercialized for both public and private entities in the field of water management and risk prevention. The work presented in this paper relies on scientific improvements for each product and services as well as on the digital Twin architecture that allows interoperability with other systems.

Flood simulation and forecast capability have been greatly improved thanks to advances in data assimilation (DA) strategies incorporating various types of observations; many are derived from Earth Observations from space. This article focuses on the assimilation of 2-D flood observations derived from synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images acquired during a flood event with a dual state-parameter ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF). Resulting binary wet/dry maps are here expressed in terms of wet surface ratios (WSRs) over a number of subdomains of the floodplain. This ratio is assimilated jointly with in situ water-level observations to improve the flow dynamics within the floodplain. However, the non-Gaussianity of the observation errors associated with these SAR-derived measurements breaks a major hypothesis for the application of the EnKF, thus jeopardizing the optimality of the filter analysis. The novelty of this article lies in the treatment of the non-Gaussianity of the SAR-derived WSR observations with a Gaussian anamorphosis (GA) process. This DA strategy was validated and applied over the Garonne Marmandaise catchment (southwest of France) represented with a TELEMAC-2D hydrodynamic model, first in a twin experiment and then for a major flood event that occurred in January and February 2021. It was shown that assimilating SAR-derived WSR observations in complement to the in situ water-level observations significantly improves the representation of the flood dynamics. The GA process brings further improvement to the DA analysis while also demonstrating to be a nonessential element. This study heralds a reliable solution for flood forecasting over poorly gauged catchments thanks to available remote sensing datasets.

This paper reports on the main results of SMOS-HR instrument technical study, a new interferometric radiometer dedicated to Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity measurement from space. The instrument aims at providing enhanced spatial resolution with respect to SMOS and integrating robust RFI (RF Interference) mitigation technique. The instrument key performance requirements and the architecture features and trade-offs are exposed in this paper.

Floods are the most common natural disasters all over the world and they are increasing in frequency and intensity due to climate changes. The Space for Climate Observatory (SCO)-FloodDAM-DT project with a joint collaboration effort between CNES, NASA’s partners and JPL is devoted to developing a federated Earth System Digital Twin (ESDT) for water-cycle applications focused on flood events. In particular, SCO-FloodDAM-DT project aims to provide an automated pre-operational service to reliably detect, monitor and assess floods at global scale within digital twin collaboration with NASA/JPL. The main objective is to connect data and existing models from both agencies in order to combine multi-scale simulations taking into account multiple phases of an entire flood event, from early alerts to post-event impact assessments. At the end, a proof-of-concept demonstration, planned after 18 months, will be presented with its multi-scale aspect over French and USA selected catchments.

For the first time, co-located wind vectors and wave spectral characteristics are available thanks to the French/Chinese CFOSAT mission, which includes a wind scatterometer SCAT and a wave scatterometer SWIM. Three years after its launch, CFOSAT data is thoroughly qualified and various scientific work has been undertaken. This paper focuses on CFOSAT SWIM data, its performance and scientific contribution to oceanography, coastal and sea ice study.

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The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite is performing systematic L-band observations since 2009, allowing a large number of science and operational applications. Several recent studies have shown the need of the continuity of L-band observations, in particular with an increased angular resolution. In this contribution, two instrumental concepts are presented to reach native resolutions of 5–10 km. In addition, using airborne data, it is also shown that the accuracy of downscaling coarser resolution L-band data to 5–10 km using a high resolution auxiliary data set, is significantly lower than that of native high resolution observations.

The Chinese-French oceanography satellite, CFOSAT, was launched on October 2018. Two Ku-band scatterometers are on-board: SCAT for the wind observation and SWIM for the wave observation. After a first phase mainly dedicated to validation and identification of improvement possibilities, the ground processing and products generated were upgraded. This paper presents the main evolutions implemented and their positive impacts on the SWIM data quality.

This article describes the first results obtained from the Surface Waves Investigation and Monitoring (SWIM) instrument carried by the China France Oceanography Satellite (CFOSAT), which was launched on October 29, 2018. SWIM is a Ku-band radar with a near-nadir scanning beam geometry. It was designed to measure the spectral properties of surface ocean waves. First, the good behavior of the instrument is illustrated. It is then shown that the nadir products (significant wave height, normalized radar cross section, and wind speed) exhibit an accuracy similar to standard altimeter missions, thanks to a new retracking algorithm, which compensates a lower sampling rate compared to standard altimetry missions. The off-nadir beam observations are analyzed in detail. The normalized radar cross section varies with incidence and wind speed as expected from previous studies presented in the literature. We illustrate that, in order to retrieve the wave spectra from the radar backscattering fluctuations, it is crucial to apply a speckle correction derived from the observations. Directional spectra of ocean waves and their mean parameters are then compared to wave model data at the global scale and to in situ data from a selection of case studies. The good efficiency of SWIM to provide the spectral properties of ocean waves in the wavelength range [70-500 m] is illustrated. The main limitations are discussed, and the perspectives to improve the data quality are presented.

The European Space Agency (ESA) Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) has been providing the longest consistent data record of passive L-band (1.4 GHz) observations for more than ten years. SMOS, as well as the NASA missions SMAP and Aquarius have demonstrated the interest of L-band observations for land, ocean and cryosphere studies. The continuity of L-band observations must be assured taking into account that the spatial resolution (~ 40 km) of SMOS and SMAP is too coarse for some applications. Disaggregation strategies can be implemented but using airborne data, we show that the quality of the downscaled data cannot match that of an instrument with higher native resolution. The goal of the SMOS-HR (High Resolution) mission is to ensure the continuity of L-band observations while increasing the native resolution to 10 km. SMOS-HR will carry an array of ~ 230 antennas to perform aperture synthesis. The antenna distribution has been optimized to reduce the aliasing in the reconstructed images and SMOS-HR will incorporate advanced on-board Radio Frequency Interferences (RFI) mitigation techniques.

The Chinese-French oceanography satellite, CFOSAT, was launched on October 2018. Two Ku-band scatterometers are on-board: SCAT for the wind observation and SWIM for the wave observation. This paper presents the most recent results on the SWIM data quality analysis a few months after the end of the CAL/VAL phase.

The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite has provided, for the very first time, systematic passive L-band (1420−1427 MHz) measurements from space with a spatial resolution of ~50 Km. This contribution presents preliminary results of studies conducted for a High Resolution (HR) follow-on mission. The SMOS-HR project is currently undergoing a Phase 0 study by the French space agency. The goal is to ensure continuity of L-band measurements while increasing the spatial resolution to ~10 Km without degrading the radiometric sensitivity and keeping the revisit time of 3 days unchanged.

The European Space Agency (ESA) Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite has provided, for the first time, systematic passive L-band (1.4 GHz) measurements from space. This new data set, with a spatial resolution of ~40 km, has allowed a number of outstanding results over land (soil moisture, vegetation properties, frozen soils, ...), ocean (salinity, meso-scale phenomena, river plumes, high winds, ...) and cryosphere. SMOS, together with the NASA missions SMAP and Aquarius, have demonstrated the interest of the continuity of L-band observations. However, higher spatial resolution (1-10 km) is needed for applications related to water resources management and food security, for instance. Over the ocean as well as in coastal areas, higher resolution will bring the possibility to study in detail meso-scale processes and salinity (and density) variations closer to the coast. Over ice, higher spatial resolution will allow to monitor melting events in the coastal regions of Antarctica, for instance. In order to ensure the continuity of Earth observations in the L-band, while improving the resolution of the current generation of radiometers, new mission concepts are needed. We present the SMOS-HR (High-Resolution) project, which is currently in Phase 0 at CNES (Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales).

This paper presents the goal, organization and first results of the calibration and validation activities devoted to the Ku-band wave scatterometer SWIM in operation since the end of October 2018 after the launch of the China-France Oceanography SATellite CFOSAT.

The wave scatterometer, SWIM, will be on-board the Chinese French oceanographic mission, CFOSAT. It will complete the Chinese wind scatterometer, SCAT. They will provide the scientific community with joint wind and wave measurements for the very first time. The launch is now coming soon: autumn 2018. SWIM is a Ku-band real-aperture radar with 6 rotating fan-beams pointing near nadir. The main characteristics and performance of the instrument measured during the Satellite Integration Campaign, products and ground segment development are presented in this paper, as well as predicted performances estimated from simulations.