Eugenio Realini

This work describes a system aimed at the near realtimemonitoring of precipitable water vapor (PWV) by means of a dense network of Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) receivers. These receivers are deployed with a horizontal spacing of 1-2 km around the Uji campus of Kyoto University, Japan. The PWV observed using a standard GPS meteorology t...

goGPS is a free and open source satellite positioning software package aiming to provide a collaborative platform for research and teaching purposes. It was first published in 2009 and since then several related projects are on-going. Its objective is the investigation of strategies for enhancing the accuracy of low-cost single-frequency GPS receiv...

The recent access to GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) phase observations on smart devices, enabled by Google through its Android operating system, opens the possibility to apply precise positioning techniques using off-the-shelf, mass-market devices. The target of this work is to evaluate whether this is feasible, and which positioning acc...

This paper presents the first experimental results of a study on the ingestion in the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, of Sentinel satellites and Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) derived products. The experiments concern a flash-floodevent occurred in Tuscany (Central Italy) in September 2017. The rationale is that numerical...

The Mediterranean region is frequently struck by severe rainfall events causing numerous casualties and several million euros of damages every year. Thus, improving the forecast accuracy is a fundamental goal to limit social and economic damages. Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models are currently able to produce forecasts at the km scale grid...

Flooding is one of the most frequent natural disasters worldwide, resulting in substantial socioeconomic losses and public health threats. The EASTERN project proposes an innovative approach exploiting Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to combine data collected from Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imaging and ground measurements for real-time...

This paper presents an experimental study on the integration of the fifth generation (5G) cellular networks and the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) for positioning. Along with the use of experimental data collected from both 5G and GNSS deployed technologies, the novelty of this research includes the design of a Bayesian tracking methodol...

The impact of assimilating GNSS-ZTD (global navigation satellite system–zenith total delay) on the precipitable water vapor and precipitation forecast over Italy is studied for the month of October 2019, which was characterized by several moderate to intense precipitation events, especially over northwestern Italy. The WRF (Weather Research and For...

This research examines the feasibility of using synchronization signals broadcasted by currently deployed fifth generation (5G) cellular networks to determine the position of a static receiver. The main focus lies on the analysis of synchronization among the base stations of a real 5G network in Milan, Italy, as this has a major impact on the accur...

Citation: Esbrí, L.; Rigo, T.; Llasat, M.C.; Biondi, R.; Federico, S.; Gluchshenko, O.; Kerschbaum, M.; Lagasio, M.; Mazzarella, V.; Milelli, M.; et al. Application of Severe Weather Nowcasting to Case Studies in Air Traffic Management. Abstract: Effective and time-efficient aircraft assistance and guidance in severe weather environments remains a...

Citation: Temme, M.-M.; Gluchshenko, O.; Nöhren, L.; Kleinert, M.; Ohneiser, O.; Muth, K.; Ehr, H.; Groß, N.; Temme, A.; Lagasio, M.; et al. Innovative Integration of Severe Weather Forecasts into an Extended Arrival Manager. Aerospace 2023, 10, 210. Abstract: In the H2020 project "Satellite-borne and INsitu Observations to Predict The Initiation o...

The impact of assimilating GNSS-ZTD (Global Navigation Satellite Systems - Zenith Total Delay) on the precipitable water vapor and precipitation forecast over Italy is studied for the month of October 2019, characterized by several moderate to intense precipitation events. The WRF (Weather Research and Forecasting) model 4.1.3 is used with its 3DVa...

A comprehensive analysis of the July 2021 event that occurred on Lake Como (Italy), during which heavy hailstorms and floods affected the surroundings of Lake, is presented. The study provides a detailed analysis of the event using different observation sources currently available. The employed techniques include both conventional (rain gauges, rad...

The impact of extreme weather on air traffic is a global challenge that results in varying delays to flights depending on climate zone, traffic, and available infrastructure. Due to an observed increase in severe weather events, this impact on air traffic is expected to grow in intensity in the coming years, making it increasingly important to orga...

The growth of air transport demand expected over the next decades, along with the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, such as heavy rainfalls and severe storms due to climate change, will pose a tough challenge for air traffic management systems, with implications for flight safety, delays and passengers. In this context,...

In EUROCONTROLS's recent summary report on Climate Changes Risks for European Aviation, several weather-related impacts were highlighted. There is a strong relation between highly impacting weather events and disruptions to the aviation network resulting in additional fuel consumption and CO2 emissions. In Europe, severe weather is responsible for...

Nowadays, predicting the exact location and timing of severe convective phenomena at small spatial and temporal scales is still a challenge. In this respect, the H2020 SESAR project "Satellite-borne and IN-situ Observations to Predict The Initiation of Convection for ATM" (SINOPTICA) aims to improve the forecast of severe weather events by using th...

Climate change is intensifying the water cycle, bringing more intense precipitation and flooding in some regions, as well as longer and stronger droughts in others. The number of short-term and highly localized phenomena, such as thunderstorms, hailstorms, wind gusts or tornadoes, is expected to grow in the coming years, with important repercussion...

One of the main challenges for meteorologists is to improve the prediction of severe weather events that develop on small spatial and temporal scales and that have important repercussions in air traffic management activities (ATM). In this regard, the H2020 project "Satellite-borne and IN-situ Observations to Predict The Initiation of Convection fo...

Project objectives Severe weather cases identification Nowcasting technique and validation Numerical simulations and validation Conclusions and future perspectives

One of the challenges for meteorologists is to forecast severe weather events developing at small spatial and temporal scales. The H2020 SESAR project "Satellite-borne and IN-situ Observations to Predict The Initiation of Convection for ATM" (SINOPTICA) aims at improving the performances of the numerical weather prediction model to nowcast severe w...

One of the challenges for meteorologists is to forecast severe weather events developing at small spatial and temporal scales. The H2020 SESAR project "Satellite-borne and IN-situ Observations to Predict The Initiation of Convection for ATM" (SINOPTICA) aims at improving the performances of the numerical weather prediction model to nowcast severe w...

The prediction of rapidly developing thunderstorms in small and localized areas is a challenge for the scientific community. Quickly developing but intense thunderstorms are usually characterized by large hail size, huge amount of rain in a short period, high lightning frequency and strong winds thus potentially capable to affect people and socio-e...

In this article, we report the first investigation over time of the atmospheric conditions around terrestrial gamma-ray flash (TGF) occurrences, using GPS sensors in combination with geostationary satellite observations and ERA5 reanalysis data. The goal is to understand which characteristics are favorable to the development of these events and to...

In this article we report the first investigation over time of the atmospheric conditions around TGFs occurrence, using GPS sensors in combination with geostationary satellite observations and ERA5 reanalyses data. The goal is to understand which characteristics are favourable to the development of these events and to investigate if any precursor s...

In the last decades, the great availability of data and computing power drove the development of powerful machine learning techniques in many research areas, including the ones, as the meteorology, where traditional conceptual models were usually adopted. In this work, we analyze the performance obtained by different techniques in the forecasting o...

Severe weather events locally developing in a short time range are one of the major risks for aviation safety. Nowcasting and understanding the initiation of storm cells is still a challenging topic for meteorology and atmospheric physics. We combined the use of weather radar, weather stations and ground-based GNSS receivers to characterize the sev...

The availability of atmospheric water vapor content observations, with high temporal and spatial resolution, proved to have a high impact in the prediction of heavy rain events obtained from numerical weather prediction models. Several techniques can be applied to derive such observations. Some of them are well consolidated, some others are still u...

The use of low-cost GNSS stations for meteorological applications requires the modeling of ionospheric errors. Although low-cost dual-frequency receivers are now available, current ones are still missing the L2 frequency and this prevents the availability of iono-free observations. This second frequency can be predicted by exploiting dual-frequency...

Atmospheric Phase Screens (APSs) derived from Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) observations contain the difference between the tropospheric water-vapor-induced delay of two acquisition epochs, i.e., the slave and the master (or reference) epochs. Using estimates of the atmospheric state coming from independent sources, for example n...

A prototype of a low-cost GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System) monitoring system was installed on a deep-seated landslide in northwestern Slovenia to test its performance under field conditions. The system consists of newly developed GNSS stations based on low-cost, dual-frequency receivers and open-source GNSS processing software. It automati...

A Synthetic Aperture Radar can offer not only an accurate monitoring of the earth surface deformation, but also information on the troposphere, such as the total path delay or the columnar water vapor at high horizontal resolution. This can be achieved by a proper interferometric processing and post-processing of the radar interferograms. The fine...

Monitoring and predicting extreme atmospheric events, such as deep convective systems, is very challenging especially when they develop locally in a short time range. Despite the great improvement in model parametrization and the use of satellite measurements, there are still large uncertainties on the knowledge of the dynamical processes of deep c...

Multipath mitigation approach implemented in goGPS. This presentation is a modified version of the previous presented in Luxembourg, here with improved descriptions and new figures for the EGU2020 General Assembly. The strategy uses Zernike polynomials interpolation and high-resolution gridding to compute multipath maps from the residuals of the G...

Receiver antenna calibration plays an important role in precise point positioning (PPP). Correct management of multipath effects can improve the estimation of tropospheric parameters and the stability of the coordinates over short measurement sessions. In the years, many techniques have been developed to mitigate multipath effects, among them multi...

This paper proposes a simple and fast method to estimate Atmospheric Phase Screens (APSs) by jointly exploit a stack of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images and a dataset of GNSS-derived atmospheric product. The output of this processing is conceived to be ingested by Numerical Weather Prediction Models (NWPMs) to improve weather forecasts. In ord...

The accuracy of surface meteorological measurements is vital to derive accurate Global Positioning System (GPS) Precipitable Water Vapour (PWV) data. However, in absence of surface meteorological data, data from Numerical Weather Prediction Models (NWP) are used. The accuracy of these models varies depending on the model, region, season and other c...

Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) have been routinely used in the last decades to estimate water vapor content in the lower part of the atmosphere. Water vapor measurements have been successfully integrated in Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models, showing a positive impact on the forecast of rain events. Since few years, it is possible...

In the last few years, many studies claimed that machine learning tools would soon overperform the classical conceptual models in extreme rainfall events forecasting. In order to better investigate this statement, we implement advanced deep learning predictors, such as the deep neural nets, for the forecasting of the occurrence of extreme rainfalls...

Goal of the project was to investigate whether the assimilation of high resolution Earth Observation variables improve the forecast of heavy rain events. Several experiments were conducted assimilating soil moisture, surface wind, sea surface temperature, land surface temperature and zenith total delay. The assimilation of wind and water vapor cont...

The Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) can be used to derive accurately the Zenith Tropospheric Delay (ZTD) under all-weather conditions. The derived ZTDs play a vital role in climate studies, weather forecasting and are operationally assimilated into numerical weather prediction models. In this study, variations and statistical analysis of...

The new version of the open-source goGPS MATLAB software has been written to be a simple tool to perform efficient analysis of GNSS data from both geodetic and low-cost receivers. With its capability to download automatically all the resources needed by the selected algorithms, the relative easiness of use, and its flexibility with the possibility...

The activities carried out within the WP2 of the TWIGA-H2020 project are described. In particular, the following topics are covered: the definition of a new low-cost GNSS receiver network to be soon installed in Uganda, a new algorithm for the retrieval of water vapor maps from Sentinel-1 data and the ongoing numerical weather prediction experiment...

The knowledge of water vapour distribution is a key element in atmospheric modeling and considerable information, also at the local scale, can be derived from the GPS-ZTD (global positioning system-Zenith total delay) data. This paper shows the assimilation of GPS-ZTD data into the RAMS@ISAC (Regional Atmospheric Modeling System at Institute of Atm...

A new low-cost L1/L2c receiver board is presented in this short letter, along with its first tests. The main strength of the board is its low price tag (around 200 EUR, in quantities of hundreds) as an effective dual-frequency receiver. The effectiveness of the receiver was at first proven by a pedestrian walk experiment on a closed loop, allowing...

GNSS atmospheric water vapor monitoring is not yet routinely performed in Italy, particularly at the regional scale. However, in order to support the activities of regional environmental protection agencies, there is a widespread need to improve forecasting of heavy rainfall events. Localized convective rain forecasts are often misplaced in space a...

We studied the assimilation of high-resolution precipitable water vapor (PWV) data derived from a hyper-dense global navigation satellite system network around Uji city, Kyoto, Japan, which had a mean inter-station distance of about 1.7 km. We focused on a heavy rainfall event that occurred on August 13–14, 2012, around Uji city. We employed a loca...

Recent advances in the field of atmospheric and ionospheric sensing by GNSS and SAR technologies were discussed during two workshops held in February 2016 and October 2016 in Italy, hosted by GEOlab of Politecnico di Milano under partial support of the JSPS Bilateral Open Partnership Joint Research Projects. Another symposium was held in March 2017...

The STEAM (SaTellite Earth observation for Atmospheric Modelling) project, funded by the European Space Agency, aims at investigating new areas of synergy between high-resolution numerical weather prediction (NWP) models and data from spaceborne remote sensing sensors. An example of synergy is the incorporation of high-resolution remote sensing dat...

Dual-frequency Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSSs) enable the estimation of Zenith Tropospheric Delay (ZTD) which can be converted to Precipitable Water Vapor (PWV). The density of existing GNSS monitoring networks is insufficient to capture small-scale water vapor variations that are especially important for extreme weather forecasting. A...

Since many years, the GNSS has been regarded by the meteorological community as one of the systems for atmospheric water vapour remote sensing. Time series of wet delays, estimated as by-products of accurate positioning, have been assimilated into numerical weather prediction models. However, a dedicated use the system for water vapour monitoring i...

The European Space Agency (ESA) STEAM (SaTellite Earth observation for Atmospheric Modelling) project aims at investigating new areas of synergy between high-resolution numerical atmosphere models and data from spaceborne remote sensing sensors, with focus on Copernicus Sentinels 1, 2 and 3 satellites. An example of synergy is the ingestion of surf...

A pure GNSS navigation is often unreliable in urban areas because of the presence of obstructions, thus preventing a correct reception of the satellite signal. The bridging between GNSS outages, as well as the vehicle attitude reconstruction, can be recovered by using complementary information, such as visual data acquired by RGB-D or RGB cameras....

We studied the assimilation of high-resolution precipitable water vapor (PWV) data derived from a hyper-dense global navigation satellite system network around Uji city, Kyoto, Japan, which had a mean inter-station distance of about 1.7 km. We focused on a heavy rainfall event that occurred on August 13–14, 2012, around Uji city. We employed a loca...

goGPS is a GNSS processing software written in MATLAB, that was originally developed for precise positioning purposes, mainly based on the double-difference relative approach. To broaden its use by including also tropospheric delay estimation, all the algorithms and procedures needed to apply PPP (Precise Point Positioning) were implemented. In add...

Geological, hydrological, geotechnical, and environmental phenomena causing deformation of the Earth surface (subsidence, landslides, floods, sinking, tectonic activity) are happening at an increasing rate, also due to extreme events likely to be driven by climate change. These phenomena govern negative and sometimes destructive impacts on land, st...

In the last decades, low-cost GNSS receivers have been widely used for navigation purposes. Some of them deliver also raw data, allowing for a more sophisticated processing, such as the double-difference approach, and therefore a more accurate positioning, typically at the decimeter level. However, these accuracies can be generally achieved only wi...

The estimation of the precipitable water vapour content (W) with high temporal and spatial resolution is of great interest to both meteorological and climatological studies. Several methodologies based on remote sensing techniques have been recently developed in order to obtain accurate and frequent measurements of this atmospheric parameter. Among...

The estimation of the precipitable water vapor content (W) with high temporal and spatial resolution is of great interest in both meteorological and climatological studies. Several methodologies based on remote sensing techniques have been recently developed, in order to obtain accurate and frequent measurements of this atmospheric parameter. Among...