Federico Serva

Kai Jeggle, Mikolaj Czerkawski, Federico Serva et al.

Clouds containing ice particles play a crucial role in the climate system. Yet they remain a source of great uncertainty in climate models and future climate projections. In this work, we create a new observational constraint of regime-dependent ice microphysical properties at the spatio-temporal coverage of geostationary satellite instruments and the quality of active satellite retrievals. We achieve this by training a convolutional neural network on three years of SEVIRI and DARDAR data sets. This work will enable novel research to improve ice cloud process understanding and hence, reduce uncertainties in a changing climate and help assess geoengineering methods for cirrus clouds.

Patrick Ebel, Brandon Victor, Peter Naylor et al.

Hurricanes and coastal floods are among the most disastrous natural hazards. Both are intimately related to storm surges, as their causes and effects, respectively. However, the short-term forecasting of storm surges has proven challenging, especially when targeting previously unseen locations or sites without tidal gauges. Furthermore, recent work improved short and medium-term weather forecasting but the handling of raw unassimilated data remains non-trivial. In this paper, we tackle both challenges and demonstrate that neural networks can implicitly assimilate sparse in situ tide gauge data with coarse ocean state reanalysis in order to forecast storm surges. We curate a global dataset to learn and validate the dense prediction of storm surges, building on preceding efforts. Other than prior work limited to known gauges, our approach extends to ungauged sites, paving the way for global storm surge forecasting.

Gabriele Meoni, Roberto Del Prete, Federico Serva et al.

Nowadays, there is growing interest in applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) on board Earth Observation (EO) satellites for time-critical applications, such as natural disaster response. However, the unavailability of raw satellite data currently hinders research on lightweight pre-processing techniques and limits the exploration of end-to-end pipelines, which could offer more efficient and accurate extraction of insights directly from the source data. To fill this gap, this work presents a novel methodology to automate the creation of datasets for the detection of target events (e.g., warm thermal hotspots) or objects (e.g., vessels) from Sentinel-2 raw data and other multispectral EO pushbroom raw imagery. The presented approach first processes the raw data by applying a pipeline consisting of spatial band registration and georeferencing of the raw data pixels. Then, it detects the target events by leveraging event-specific state-of-the-art algorithms on the Level-1C products, which are mosaicked and cropped on the georeferenced correspondent raw granule area. The detected events are finally re-projected back onto the corresponding raw images. We apply the proposed methodology to realize THRawS (Thermal Hotspots in Raw Sentinel-2 data), the first dataset of Sentinel-2 raw data containing warm thermal hotspots. THRawS includes 1090 samples containing wildfires, volcanic eruptions, and 33,335 event-free acquisitions to enable thermal hotspot detection and general classification applications. This dataset and associated toolkits provide the community with both an immediately useful resource as well as a framework and methodology acting as a template for future additions. With this work, we hope to pave the way for research on energy-efficient pre-processing algorithms and AI-based end-to-end processing systems on board EO satellites.