Exploring the Full Potential of InSar Meteorology to Monitor Extreme Weather Events

In this work, we investigate the assimilation of InSAR-derived water vapor into the Weather Research and Forecast Data Assimilation model (WRFDA) and evaluate the impact within the InSAR footprint and also over time and space. We ingested three sequential InSAR-derived water vapor maps, estimated from Sentinel-1 images acquired over southern Portugal and Spain during Storm Barbara in October 2020, and assessed the water vapor anomaly fields thousands of kilometers downstream and their impact on rainfall. We show that the assimilation of InSAR-derived water vapor into NWP models has the potential to enhance the understanding of mesoscale meteorological events and improve the model's capability to simulate extreme weather events. This is particularly relevant for flood forecasting and timely weather predictions.