Numerical weather prediction models and SAR interferometry: Synergic use for meteorological and INSAR applications

Spaceborne Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) is a well established technique useful in many land applications, such as landslide monitoring and digital elevation model extraction. One of its major limitation is the atmospheric effect, and in particular the high water vapour spatial and temporal variability which introduces an unknown delay in the signal propagation. However, the sensitivity of SAR interferometric phase to atmospheric conditions could in principle be exploited and InSAR could become in certain conditions a tool to monitor the atmosphere, as it happens with GPS receiver networks. This paper describes a novel attempt to assimilate InSAR derived information on the atmosphere, based on the Permanent Scatterer multipass technique, into a numerical weather forecast model. The methodology is summarised and the very preliminary results regarding the forecast of a precipitation event in Central Italy are analysed. The work was done in the framework of an ESA funded project devoted to the mapping of the water vapour with the aim to mitigate its effect for InSAR applications.