TY - JOUR
T1 - Assessment of the SMAP Passive Soil Moisture Product
AU - Chan, Steven K.
AU - Bindlish, Rajat
AU - O'Neill, Peggy E.
AU - Njoku, Eni G
AU - Jackson, Tom
AU - Colliander, Andreas
AU - Chen, Fan
AU - Burgin, Mariko
AU - Dunbar, Scott
AU - Piepmeier, Jeffrey
AU - Yueh, Simon H.
AU - Entekhabi, Dara
AU - Cosh, Michael H
AU - Caldwell, Todd
AU - Walker, Jeffrey
AU - Wu, Xiaoling
AU - Berg, Aaron
AU - Rowlandson, Tracy
AU - Pacheco, Anna
AU - McNairn, Heather
AU - Thibeault, Marc
AU - Martinez-Fernandez, Jose
AU - Gonzalez-Zamora, Angel
AU - Seyfried, Mark
AU - Bosch, David D.
AU - Starks, Patrick J.
AU - Goodrich, David
AU - Prueger, John H.
AU - Palecki, Michael
AU - Small, Eric J
AU - Zreda, Marek M
AU - Calvet, Jean-Christophe
AU - Crow, Wade T
AU - Kerr, Yann
PY - 2016/8/1
Y1 - 2016/8/1
N2 - The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite mission was launched on January 31, 2015. The observatory was developed to provide global mapping of high-resolution soil moisture and freeze-thaw state every two to three days using an L-band (active) radar and an L-band (passive) radiometer. After an irrecoverable hardware failure of the radar on July 7, 2015, the radiometer-only soil moisture product became the only operational soil moisture product for SMAP. The product provides soil moisture estimates posted on a 36 km Earth-fixed grid produced using brightness temperature observations from descending passes. Within months after the commissioning of the SMAP radiometer, the product was assessed to have attained preliminary (beta) science quality, and data were released to the public for evaluation in September 2015. The product is available from the NASA Distributed Active Archive Center at the National Snow and Ice Data Center. This paper provides a summary of the Level 2 Passive Soil Moisture Product (L2-SM-P) and its validation against in situ ground measurements collected from different data sources. Initial in situ comparisons conducted between March 31, 2015 and October 26, 2015, at a limited number of core validation sites (CVSs) and several hundred sparse network points, indicate that the V-pol Single Channel Algorithm (SCA-V) currently delivers the best performance among algorithms considered for L2-SM-P, based on several metrics. The accuracy of the soil moisture retrievals averaged over the CVSs was 0.038 m3/m3 unbiased root-mean-square difference (ubRMSD), which approaches the SMAP mission requirement of 0.040 m3/m3.
AB - The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite mission was launched on January 31, 2015. The observatory was developed to provide global mapping of high-resolution soil moisture and freeze-thaw state every two to three days using an L-band (active) radar and an L-band (passive) radiometer. After an irrecoverable hardware failure of the radar on July 7, 2015, the radiometer-only soil moisture product became the only operational soil moisture product for SMAP. The product provides soil moisture estimates posted on a 36 km Earth-fixed grid produced using brightness temperature observations from descending passes. Within months after the commissioning of the SMAP radiometer, the product was assessed to have attained preliminary (beta) science quality, and data were released to the public for evaluation in September 2015. The product is available from the NASA Distributed Active Archive Center at the National Snow and Ice Data Center. This paper provides a summary of the Level 2 Passive Soil Moisture Product (L2-SM-P) and its validation against in situ ground measurements collected from different data sources. Initial in situ comparisons conducted between March 31, 2015 and October 26, 2015, at a limited number of core validation sites (CVSs) and several hundred sparse network points, indicate that the V-pol Single Channel Algorithm (SCA-V) currently delivers the best performance among algorithms considered for L2-SM-P, based on several metrics. The accuracy of the soil moisture retrievals averaged over the CVSs was 0.038 m3/m3 unbiased root-mean-square difference (ubRMSD), which approaches the SMAP mission requirement of 0.040 m3/m3.
KW - Brightness temperature
KW - L-band
KW - land emission
KW - Level 2 Passive Soil Moisture Product (L2-SM-P)
KW - Level 3 Daily Composite Version (L3-SM-P)
KW - passive microwave remote sensing
KW - soil moisture
KW - Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP)
KW - tau-omega(τ-ω) model
KW - validation
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84971422006&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/TGRS.2016.2561938
DO - 10.1109/TGRS.2016.2561938
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84971422006
SN - 0196-2892
VL - 54
SP - 4994
EP - 5007
JO - IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing
JF - IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing
IS - 8
M1 - 7478653
ER -