Speaker
Description
Soil moisture (SM) content is an essential climate variable that is operationally delivered at low resolution (e.g. 36-9 km) by earth observation missions, such as ESA/SMOS, NASA/SMAP and EUMETSAT/ASCAT. However numerous land applications would benefit from the availability of soil moisture maps at higher resolution. For this reason, there is a large research effort to develop soil moisture products at higher resolution using, for instance, data acquired by the new ESA’s Sentinel missions.
The objective of this study is to present the validation status of a pre-operational soil moisture product derived from Sentinel-1 at 1 km resolution and at large scale. The product is developed within the context of an ESA SEOM study (seom.esa.int/page_project034.php).
The paper will present: i) a comparison of S-1 SM estimates against in situ observations collected over various cal/val sites located in USA, Canada, Australia and Europe and ii) a cross comparison between S-1, SMAP, SMOS and ASCAT SM estimates retrieved over a large area of the Mediterranean basin. In addition, a strategy to derive SM fields at higher resolution, e.g., ~0.1 km, will be discussed and examples provided.
