0000000000407615
AUTHOR
Luciana Rossato
A spatially consistent downscaling approach for SMOS using an adaptive window
The European Space Agency (ESA)'s Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) is the first spaceborne mission using L-band radiometry to monitor the Earth's global surface soil moisture (SM). After more than 7 years in orbit, many studies have contributed to improve the quality and applicability of SMOS-derived SM maps. In this research, a novel downscaling algorithm for SMOS is proposed to obtain high-resolution (HR) SM maps at 1 km (L4), from the ∼40 km native resolution of the instrument. This algorithm introduces the concept of a shape adaptive moving window as an improvement of the current semi-empirical downscaling approach at SMOS Barcelona Expert Center, based on the “universal triangle…
Microwave and optical data fusion for global mapping of soil moisture at high resolution
After more than 8 years in orbit the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite is still in good health and several algorithms for improving its spatial resolution have been proposed and validated in a variety of catchments. However, none of them has yet been applied at the global scale. In this article we present: i) a review of the latest SMOS-BEC downscaling algorithm, which allows for its global application using an adaptive moving window and ii) a thorough validation of the resulting maps over two in-situ networks: REMEDHUS in Spain and OzNet in Australia. The proposed algorithm combines SMOS brightness temperatures (at ~40 km spatial resolution), and MODIS-derived Land Surface …