Evolution of soil moisture and river altimetry ; Évolution de l’humidité des sols et de l’altimétrie fluviale

Water is an integral part of life on our planet and it plays an important role in climatic changes. Water resources research is, therefore, very important for the climate communities to not only closely monitor the regional and global water supply budget, but to also understand changes in frequency of occurrence and strength of individual weather events. This is especially true for extreme weather events, which have great societal and economic impacts. Whether we will have more or more intense tropical storms, mega-snow events, or dust-bowls in the near or far future climate. This is one of the key focus areas of climate research.The aim of my PhD work is to provide some answers to assess the impact of future climate change threats on water resources. And we are trying to find the adaptive tools needed for sustainable water resources management.In an effort to optimize water resource management, it is crucial to improve soil moisture situation awareness. With the advent of remote sensing, soil moisture is systematically monitored at the global scale but at the expense of the temporal and/or spatial resolution. Recent studies suggested to take advantage of continuously emitted waves by the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) constellations, to retrieve soil moisture. This opportunistic remote sensing technique, known as GNSS Reflectometry (GNSS-R), consists in comparing the interference of reflected waves by the ground and those which come directly from satellites. In my thesis, I focused on GNSS-R technique base on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) recorded by conventional GNSS receiver with single antenna to retrieve soil moisture variations. Previous studies show the efficiency of this methodology for clay soil and I demonstrate for the first time, it's efficiency for sandy soil using Unwrapping phase method. This method that I propose has been successfully applied to determine local soil moisture variations of : (1) 100% of sand in Volleyball playground (Toulouse, France); and (2) >85% of sand in the ...