The soil moisture active passive experiments (SMAPEx): toward soil moisture retrieval from the SMAP mission
Date
2014
Authors
Panciera, R.
Walker, J.
Jackson, T.
Gray, D.
Tanase, M.
Ryu, D.
Monerris, A.
Yardley, H.
Rudiger, C.
Wu, X.
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Journal article
Citation
IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing, 2014; 52(1):490-507
Statement of Responsibility
Rocco Panciera, Jeffrey P. Walker, Thomas J. Jackson, Douglas A. Gray, Mihai A. Tanase, Dongryeol Ryu, Alessandra Monerris, Heath Yardley, Christoph Rüdiger, Xiaoling Wu, Ying Gao, and Jörg M. Hacker
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Abstract
NASA’s Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission will carry the first combined spaceborne L-band radiometer and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) system with the objective of mapping near-surface soil moisture and freeze/thaw state globally every 2–3 days. SMAP will provide three soil moisture products: i) high-resolution from radar (∼3 km), ii) low-resolution from radiometer (∼36 km), and iii) intermediate-resolution from the fusion of radar and radiometer (∼9 km). The Soil Moisture Active Passive Experiments (SMAPEx) are a series of three airborne field experiments designed to provide prototype SMAP data for the development and validation of soil moisture retrieval algo- rithms applicable to the SMAP mission. This paper describes the SMAPEx sampling strategy and presents an overview of the data collected during the three experiments: SMAPEx-1 (July 5–10, 2010), SMAPEx-2 (December 4–8, 2010) and SMAPEx-3 (September 5–23, 2011). The SMAPEx experiments were con- ducted in a semi-arid agricultural and grazing area located in southeastern Australia, timed so as to acquire data over a seasonal cycle at various stages of the crop growth. Airborne L-band brightness temperature (∼1 km) and radar backscatter (∼10 m) observations were collected over an area the size of a single SMAP footprint (38 km×36 km at 35◦latitude) with a 2–3 days revisit time, providing SMAP-like data for testing of radiometer-only, radar-only and combined radiometer-radar soil moisture retrieval and downscaling algorithms. Airborne observations were sup- ported by continuous monitoring of near-surface (0–5 cm) soil moisture along with intensive ground monitoring of soil moisture, soil temperature, vegetation biomass and structure, and surface roughness.
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