This European Space Agency (ESA), conference brought together nearly 200 scientists from more than 30 countries. The science conference was held at the agencies Earth Observation Center in Frascati, Italy, from November 18-20th to "to assess the state-of-the-art instruments and scientific developments used in characterizing global water cycle variability and to identify the main needs in modeling and data assimilation to improve our knowledge of water cycle science and our ability to quantify future changes in water cycle variables."

The impressive models and tremendous data sets were presented to show global trends on topics such as evaporation rates, temperature on land, and soil moisture data from the SMOS satellite. SMOS Lead Investigator, Yann Kerr, presented the first glimpse of data sent to earth from the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite, which was launched on November 2nd.

SMOS, an ESA Earth Explorer, is the first satellite designed to map sea surface salinity and to monitor soil moisture on a global scale. The first data received was acquired as part of the initial functional verification test following the instrument switch-on on 17 November. Although the image content could not be interpreted at the time, it proved the instrument was in good shape.

Data provided by SMOS will be important for weather and climate modelling, water resource management, agriculture planning, ocean currents and circulation studies and forecasting hazardous events such as floods.

Enjoy additional multimedia, and data models: http://www.esa.int/esaEO/SEM07U9K73G_index_1.html#subhead3
Source Article: http://www.esa.int/esaEO/SEM07U9K73G_index_0.html
Interview with SMOS Lead Investigator, Yann Kerr,