0000000000181177
AUTHOR
Simon Yueh
Surface Soil Moisture Retrieval Using the L-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar Onboard the Soil Moisture Active–Passive Satellite and Evaluation at Core Validation Sites
This paper evaluates the retrieval of soil moisture in the top 5-cm layer at 3-km spatial resolution using L-band dual-copolarized Soil Moisture Active–Passive (SMAP) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data that mapped the globe every three days from mid-April to early July, 2015. Surface soil moisture retrievals using radar observations have been challenging in the past due to complicating factors of surface roughness and vegetation scattering. Here, physically based forward models of radar scattering for individual vegetation types are inverted using a time-series approach to retrieve soil moisture while correcting for the effects of static roughness and dynamic vegetation. Compared with the …
Surface soil moisture retrieval using L-band SMAP SAR data and its validation
Surface soil moisture was retrieved globally by systematically correcting for the effects of vegetation and soil surface roughness. The retrieval is enabled by employing physical-models of radar forward scattering for individual vegetation types to account for vegetation scattering and absorption, and by constraining the surface roughness effect using time-series observations. The L-band SMAP multi-polarized (HH/VV/HV) σ° data acquired globally every three days were used from mid-April to early July, 2015. Assessment was conducted over 13 rigorously-chosen core validation sites covering a wide range of biomass types, biomass amount, and soil conditions. The soil moisture retrieval reached a…
An assessment of the differences between spatial resolution and grid size for the SMAP enhanced soil moisture product over homogeneous sites
Abstract Satellite-based passive microwave remote sensing typically involves a scanning antenna that makes measurements at irregularly spaced locations. These locations can change on a day to day basis. Soil moisture products derived from satellite-based passive microwave remote sensing are usually resampled to a fixed Earth grid that facilitates their use in applications. In many cases the grid size is finer than the actual spatial resolution of the observation, and often this difference is not well understood by the user. Here, this issue was examined for the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) enhanced version of the passive-based soil moisture product, which has a grid size of 9-km and …
Validation of SMAP surface soil moisture products with core validation sites
Abstract The NASA Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission has utilized a set of core validation sites as the primary methodology in assessing the soil moisture retrieval algorithm performance. Those sites provide well-calibrated in situ soil moisture measurements within SMAP product grid pixels for diverse conditions and locations. The estimation of the average soil moisture within the SMAP product grid pixels based on in situ measurements is more reliable when location specific calibration of the sensors has been performed and there is adequate replication over the spatial domain, with an up-scaling function based on analysis using independent estimates of the soil moisture distributio…
Comparison of downscaling techniques for high resolution soil moisture mapping
Soil moisture impacts exchanges of water, energy and carbon fluxes between the land surface and the atmosphere. Passive microwave remote sensing at L-band can capture spatial and temporal patterns of soil moisture in the landscape. Both ESA and NASA have launched L-band radiometers, in the form of the SMOS and SMAP satellites respectively, to monitor soil moisture globally, every 3-day at about 40 km resolution. However, their coarse scale restricts the range of applications. While SMAP included an L-band radar to downscale the radiometer soil moisture to 9 km, the radar failed after 3 months and this initial approach is not applicable to developing a consistent long term soil moisture prod…
The SMAP mission combined active-passive soil moisture product at 9 km and 3 km spatial resolutions
Abstract The NASA Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission was launched on January 31st, 2015. The spacecraft was to provide high-resolution (3 km and 9 km) global soil moisture estimates at regular intervals by combining for the first time L-band radiometer and radar observations. On July 7th, 2015, a component of the SMAP radar failed and the radar ceased operation. However, before this occurred the mission was able to collect and process ~2.5 months of the SMAP high-resolution active-passive soil moisture data (L2SMAP) that coincided with the Northern Hemisphere's vegetation green-up and crop growth season. In this study, we evaluate the SMAP high-resolution soil moisture product deri…
The SMAP and Copernicus Sentinel 1A/B microwave active-passive high resolution surface soil moisture product
Abstract Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission of NASA was launched in January 2015. Currently, SMAP has an L-band radiometer and a defunct L-band radar with a rotating 6-m mesh reflector antenna. On July 7th, 2015, the SMAP radar malfunctioned and became inoperable. Consequently, the production of high-resolution active-passive soil moisture product got hampered, and only ~2.5 months (April 15th, 2015 to July 7th, 2015) of data remain available. Therefore, during the SMAP post-radar phase, many ways were examined to restart the high-resolution soil moisture product generation of the SMAP mission. One of the feasible approaches was to substitute the SMAP radar with other available SAR…