Comparison of visible and multi-satellite global inundation datasets at high-spatial resolution

Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data (from ENVIronment SATellite (ENVISAT), Sentinel and soon the Surface Water Ocean Topography (SWOT)) would be a good complementary information because they have a high nominal spatial resolution and are less sensitive to clouds than visible measurements. However, global SAR datasets are still not available due to difficulties in developing a retrieval scheme adequate at the global scale. In order to improve our estimates of global wetland extents at high resolution and over long-term records, three interim lines of action are proposed: (1) extend the temporal record of GIEMS-D3 to exploit the full time series of microwave observations (from 1978 to present), (2) develop an approach to fuse the GSWE and GIEMS-D3 datasets leveraging the strengths of both, and (3) prepare for the release of SAR global datasets.