Jaime Gaona
Jaime Gaona was born in Burgos, Spain in 1986. Jaime has a background specialized in hydrology during his Civil Engineering studies from the University of Burgos (2013) and his M.Sc. in Hydraulics and Environment from the Polytechnic University of Valencia (2015).
Jaime holds a PhD supported by an Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate scholarship in river Sciences (2019) from Freie Universität Berlin and Universitá Degli Studi di Trento, associated with the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology (Berlin IGB), focused on characterizing and modeling the groundwater-surface water interactions (hyporheic exchange) using innovative measurement techniques such as FO-DTS and hydrogeophysics directed by Jörg Lewandowski and Alberto Bellin.
He started as postdoc in 2019 to study soil moisture and evaporation in the Spanish National Science Project HUMID devoted to the analysis of Iberian drought based on remote sensing and land surface modelling at Ebro Observatory with Pere Quintana-Seguí, while helping to lecture hydraulics and irrigation systems at the Polytechnic University of Barcelona (2020).
Jaime was from 2021 JCYL-supported researcher at the University of Salamanca, Spain, group of Water resources led by José Martínez Fernández at the Research Institute of Agrobiotechnology (CIALE), working on the analysis of soil moisture relevance to vegetation responses.
Jaime is currently research fellow working in soil moisture analysis at the Hydrology group led by Luca Brocca of the Research Institute for Geo-Hydrological Protection IRPI of the Italian National Research Council in Perugia, Italia.
Sessions
Drought monitoring across scales is increasingly feasible with the use of open data. Multiple missions dedicated to monitor specific variables as indicators of the status of the earth system contribute to the growing availability of earth observation datasets. Soil moisture is one of these key indicators to monitor the status of drought.
However, drought, as a process dependent on multiple conditions from the atmospheric scale to the local land surface scale, expresses itself as a pattern of patterns. This nested nature consisting of vast anomalies conditioned in fragments, frequently complicates the characterization of drought from only one type of observations (e.g. ground data or only certain scale of remote sensing observations). Therefore, soil moisture data at multiple spatial scales are needed.
Currently, soil moisture datasets cover a reasonably wide range of scales to enable the monitoring of drought from continental to local scale. Multiple products exist to cover the monitoring of soil moisture anomalies with resolutions in the order of tens of kilometres either from active and passive radiometric technologies like ASCAT (Advanced SCATterometer) and the European Space Agency - Climate Change Initiative (ESA-CCI) products. Similarly, the pursuit of high-resolution observations is already evidencing the advantage of high-resolution data such as that of Sentinel-1 mission for dealing with the small-scale heterogeneity. Evaluation of these two scales of available data over Europe and Italy serve as examples of their suitability for multiple drought applications, also in an operational context
For this study we benefit from the Open Earth Monitoring Cyberinfrastructure project aiming to democratize the use of earth observations open the path to generalize the integration of open datasets across scales. Overall, our goal is to support this initiative and improve the comparison and combination of open data sources. This is crucial for addressing the multi-scale challenges of earth system sciences.