Dr. Guy Schumann is the founder and CEO of RSS-Hydro SARL, a leading geospatial and modelling commercial enterprise based in Luxembourg. His expertise is in geography, remote sensing, and flood hydrology. Owing to its level of accuracy, Schumann and his team use ICESat-2’s inland surface water product ATL13 to improve models that can predict floods, where water level is the determining factor to monitor. Such models can be used to advance early warning systems.

Schumann and his team have a very strong focus in Africa where they help communities to better understand river and lake dynamics, in terms of flooding and flood disasters. In collaboration with the Swedish company Water In Sight, Schumann uses these models to derive river levels in Malawi and compare those water levels to ground measurements observed from gauges by local community members of Malawi villages. ICESat-2 data are also compared to theses ground measurements as a ‘sanity check’. When ground measurements are unavailable, ICESat-2 observations are used. These water levels are available in an online platform accessible to the public.