0000000000435401
AUTHOR
Nemesio Rodriguez-fernandez
SMOS-IC: An Alternative SMOS Soil Moisture and Vegetation Optical Depth Product
© 2017 by the authors. The main goal of the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission over land surfaces is the production of global maps of soil moisture (SM) and vegetation optical depth (τ) based on multi-angular brightness temperature (TB) measurements at L-band. The operational SMOS Level 2 and Level 3 soil moisture algorithms account for different surface effects, such as vegetation opacity and soil roughness at 4 km resolution, in order to produce global retrievals of SM and τ. In this study, we present an alternative SMOS product that was developed by INRA (Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique) and CESBIO (Centre d'Etudes Spatiales de la BIOsphère). One of the main go…
ERA5-Land: A state-of-the-art global reanalysis dataset for land applications
Framed within the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) of the European Commission, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) is producing an enhanced global dataset for the land component of the fifth generation of European ReAnalysis (ERA5), hereafter referred to as ERA5-Land. Once completed, the period covered will span from 1950 to the present, with continuous updates to support land monitoring applications. ERA5-Land describes the evolution of the water and energy cycles over land in a consistent manner over the production period, which, among others, could be used to analyse trends and anomalies. This is achieved through global high-resolution numerical integrat…
Esa's SMOS Mission – Supporting Agricultural Applications
The European Space Agency's (ESA) SMOS mission, in orbit since more than 8 years, carries a passive microwave interferometric radiometer measuring in L-Band and provides accurate global observations of emitted radiation originating from the Earth's surfaces since the atmosphere is almost transparent in this spectral range. In addition, over land the effect of vegetation on the measurements is smaller than for shorter wavelengths. The scientific objectives of the SMOS mission directly respond to the need for global observations of soil moisture and ocean salinity, two key variables used in predictive hydrological, oceanographic and atmospheric models. SMOS observations also provide informati…