H54B-07
Early results of the Soil Moisture Active Passive Validation Experiment (SMAPVEX15)
Friday, 18 December 2015: 17:30
3014 (Moscone West)
Michael H Cosh1, Thomas J Jackson2, Andreas Colliander3, David C Goodrich4, Chandra Holifield Collins4, Lynn McKee5, Seungbum Kim3 and Simon H Yueh3, (1)U. S. Dept. of Agriculture, Beltsville, MD, United States, (2)Agricultural Research Service Beltsville, Beltsville, MD, United States, (3)NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA, United States, (4)Agricultural Research Service Tucson, Tucson, AZ, United States, (5)USDA ARS, Beltsville, MD, United States
Abstract:
In August of 2015, the Soil Moisture Active Passive Validation Experiment (SMAPVEX15) was conducted to provide a high resolution soil moisture dataset for the calibration/validation of the Soil Moisture Active Passive Mission (SMAP). The Upper San Pedro River Basin and the USDA-ARS Walnut Gulch LTAR Watershed provides the infrastructure for the experiment with its extensive soil moisture and soil temperature network. A total of seven aircraft flights are planned for the Passive Active L-Band Scanning instrument (PALS) to provide a high resolution soil moisture map for a variety of soil moisture conditions across the domain. Extensive surface roughness, vegetation and soil rock fraction mapping was conducted to provide a ground truth estimate of the many ancillary datasets used in the SMAP soil moisture algorithms. A review of the methodologies employed in the experiment, as well as initial findings will be discussed.
