H41L-05
Passive/Active Microwave Soil Moisture Disaggregation Using SMAPVEX12 Data
Thursday, 17 December 2015: 09:00
3022 (Moscone West)
Bin Fang, University of South Carolina Columbia, Columbia, SC, United States; Columbia University of New York, Palisades, NY, United States, Venkataraman Lakshmi, Univ South Carolina, Columbia, SC, United States, Rajat Bindlish, Science Systems and Applications, Inc., Lanham, MD, United States, Thomas J Jackson, USDA ARS, Pendleton, OR, United States and Andreas Colliander, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, United States
Abstract:
The SMAPVEX12 experiment was conducted during June-July 2012 in Manitoba, Canada with the goal of collecting remote sensing data and ground measurements for the development and testing of soil moisture retrieval algorithms under different vegetation and soil conditions for the SMAP (Soil Moisture Active Passive) satellite launched in January 2015. The aircraft based soil moisture data provided by the passive/active microwave sensor PALS (Passive and Active L and S band System) has a nominal spatial resolution of 1500 m. In this study, a change detection algorithm is used for disaggregation of coarse passive microwave soil moisture retrievals with radar backscatter coefficients obtained with the higher spatial resolution UAVSAR (Unmanned Air Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar). The accuracy of the disaggregated change in soil moisture was evaluated using ground based soil moisture measurements. Results show that the disaggregation products are well correlated to in situ measurements. Based on the R2, the highest resolution disaggregated product at 5 m exhibits soil moisture heterogeneity that reflects the distribution of the crops. The difference of spatial standard deviation between the disaggregated and in situ soil moisture ranges from <0.001-0.131 m3/m3 also proves the spatial capability of the change detection algorithm at 5 m scale.
