The EuroSTARRS airborne campaign in support of the SMOS mission: first results over land surfaces

A number of experiments using ground-based and airborne sensors have shown the high potential of L-band passive microwave radiometry for estimating and monitoring surface soil moisture. This has led to the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission, a European Space Agency (ESA) Earth Explorer Opportunity mission. SMOS has the objective to observe soil moisture over land and sea surface salinity over sea, both key parameters for atmospheric, oceanographic and hydrological predictive models. In preparation of SMOS, the EuroSTARRS airborne campaign was carried out in November 2001. Multi-angular measurements of the surface brightness temperature at L-band (1.4 GHz) at vertical polarizati…