Estimating surface water loss using WDI and ECI: a climatological study on different land covers

The Mediterranean basin is one of those areas where the impact of climate change is showing its most alarming consequences. Many regions in this area, both woodlands and croplands, have been suffering from droughts and water deficits due to the intense summer heatwaves of the last decades. Monitoring these phenomena is key to understanding how they are evolving and what could be done to mitigate their effects. Emissivity is a useful parameter in identifying the presence (or absence) of water. Surface and dew point temperatures are extremely useful not only in measuring the intensity of the heatwave but also in accounting for how much water content the surface is losing as humidity to the atmosphere. This paper presents a climatological study of Southern Italy’s water loss for the period 2015-2023 based on daily observations acquired by the Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI), mounted on top of EUMETSAT’s MetOp satellites. The Water Deficit Index (WDI) and the Emissivity Contrast Index (ECI) were estimated: monthly averages of each quantity were produced for the period of interest. Moreover, a validation with in situ measurements was conducted to better understand how these heatwave-induced droughts have been impacting the surface on different types of land covers.