Bio

I received the Master of Science degree of Engineer in Applied Biological Sciences from Ghent University in 2012. Currently, I am working as a doctoral research assistant at the Laboratory of Hydrology and Water Management – Ghent University. My Master Thesis Dissertation focussed on merging weather radar rainfall products and in situ observations in near-real time for operational purposes. I started my doctoral research with the optimisation of soil moisture retrievals from SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity) data at the Research team: Hydrology and Climate. More specifically, we have tried to improve the roughness parameterisation in the retrieval algorithms. This study was conducted in the frame of the FLOODMOIST project, funded by BELSPO (BELgian Science POlicy). Currently, my research focusses on improving global estimates of terrestrial evaporation and root-zone soil moisture from the Global Land Evaporation Amsterdam Model (GLEAM, www.GLEAM.eu). This research frames in the ESA-funded projects SMOS+ET1 and SMOS+ET2. Next to my research activities, I was responsible for the practical exercises of Hydrological Modelling, Ground Water Flow, Irrigation and Drainage (partim Drainage) and Meteorology and Hydrology (partim Hydrology), taught at Ghent University – Faculty of Bioscience Engineering.  

Contact

Address: Coupure links 653 - Room A2.007

               9000 Ghent, Belgium

Phone: +32 9 264 61 37

E-mail: Brecht.Martens@UGent.be

Trajectory

• 2014 – Present: Doctoral research assistant – Laboratory of Hydrology and Water Management, Ghent University
• 2012 – 2014: Doctoral research scientist – Laboratory of Hydrology and Water Management, Ghent University
• 2007 – 2012: MSc. in Applied Biological Sciences – Land and Water Management, Ghent University

Recent or ongoing project

• SMOS+ET 2 (ESA) – Improving global-scale evaporation estimates through the use of SMOS data (2015-2016)

Selected publications (complete list here)

• Martens, B., Waegeman, W., Dorigo, W.A., Verhoest, N.E.C., Miralles, D.G. Terrestrial evaporation response to modes of climate variability, npj Climate and Atmospheric Science, 43, 1, 2018.
• Martens, B., de Jeu, R.A.M., Verhoest, N.E.C., Schuurmans, H., Kleijer, J., Miralles, D.G. Towards estimating land evaporation at fields scales using GLEAM. Remote Sensing, 10, 1720, 2018.
• Martens, B., Miralles, D.G., Lievens, H., van der Schalie, R., de Jeu, R.A.M., Fernández-Prieto, D., Beck, H.E., Dorigo, W.A., Verhoest, N.E.C. GLEAM v3: satellite-based land evaporation and root-zone soil moisture, Geoscientific Model Development, 10, 1903–1925, 2017.
• Miralles, D.G., Martens, B., Dolman, A.J., Jiménez, C., McCabe, M.F., Wood, E.F. Land Evaporation, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (in: “State of the Climate in 2016”), 98 (8), S34–S35, 2017.
• Beck, H.E., van Dijk, A.I.J.M., Levizzani, V., Schellekens, J., Miralles, D.G., Martens, B., de Roo, A. MSWEP: 3-hourly 0.25° global gridded precipitation (1979–2015) by merging gauge, satellite, and reanalysis data, Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 21, 589–615, 2017.
• Lievens, H., Martens, B., Verhoest, N.E.C., Hahn, S., Miralles, D.G. Assimilation of global radar backscatter and radiometer brightness temperature observations to improve soil moisture and land evaporation estimates. Remote Sensing of Environment, 189, 194–210, 2017.
• Martens, B., Miralles, D.G., Lievens, H., Fernández-Prieto, Verhoest, N.E.C. Improving terrestrial evaporation estimates over continental Australia through assimilation of SMOS soil moisture, International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation, 48(6), 146–162, 2016.
• Lievens, H., De Lannoy, G.J.M., Al Bitar, A., Drusch, M., Dumedah, G., Hendricks Franssen, H.-J., Kerr, Y.H., Tomer, S., Martens, B., Merlin, O., Pan, M., Roundy, J.K., Vereecken, H., Walker, J.P., Wood, E.F., Verhoest, N.E.C., Pauwels, V.R.N. Assimilation of SMOS soil moisture and brightness temperature products into a land surface model, Remote Sensing of Environment, 180(7), 292–304, 2016.
• Miralles, D.G., Jiménez, C., Jung, M., Michel, D., Ershadi, A., McCabe, M.F., Hirschi, M., Martens, B., Dolman, A.J., Fisher, J.B., Mu, Q., Seneviratne, S.I., Wood, E.F., Fernández-Prieto, D. The WACMOS-ET project – Part 2: Evaluation of global terrestrial evaporation datasets, Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 20(2), 823–842, 2016.