Experimental High Resolution (3 km) SMAP Soil Moisture Data Fields With Uncertainty Estimates

Abstract:

NASA’s Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission was launched on January 31^st, 2015. The objective of the mission is global mapping of surface soil moisture and landscape freeze/thaw state. SMAP utilizes an L-band radar and radiometer sharing a rotating 6-meter mesh reflector antenna. The SMAP spacecraft is in a 685-km Sun-synchronous near-polar orbit, and viewing the surface at a constant 40-degree incidence angle with a 1000-km swath width. Merging of the high-resolution active (radar) and coarse-resolution but high-sensitivity passive (radiometer) L-band observations enable an unprecedented combination of accuracy, resolution, coverage and revisit-time for soil moisture and freeze/thaw state retrievals. However, on July 7^th, 2015, the SMAP radar encountered an anomaly and is currently inoperable. Efforts are being made to revive the SMAP radar. Due to the present status of the SMAP observatory, nearly ~2.5 months (from the end of In-Orbit-Check April 13^th, 2015 to July 7^th, 2015) of the SMAP Active Passive product will be available to public through the NASA DAAC at National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). The baseline L2_SM_AP product is retrieved soil moisture from the disaggregated/downscaled brightness temperature obtained by merging the coarse-resolution (~36 km) radiometer brightness temperature data and the high-resolution (~3 km) radar backscatter data. The baseline product is intermediate scale 9 km global soil moisture information. Experimentally, a much higher resolution global surface soil moisture data set is also produced at 3 km. This experimental product covering the 2.5 Spring/Summer months is the focus of this presentation. We specifically focus on the analysis of errors and reliability of this data set. The errors in disaggregated brightness temperatures and the retrived soil moisture estimates are discussed. In the presentation the accuracies of the SMAP L2-SM_AP soil moisture retrievals will be shown using summary comparisons with in situ data over the core validation sites.