Journal article
Impact of Urban Cover Fraction on SMOS and SMAP Surface Soil Moisture Retrieval Accuracy
N Ye, JP Walker, C Rudiger, D Ryu, RJ Gurney
IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing | IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC | Published : 2019
Abstract
Both the European Space Agency's soil moisture and ocean salinity (SMOS) mission and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's soil moisture active passive (SMAP) mission employ L-band (1.413 GHz) radiometers to observe brightness temperatures at ∼40-km spatial resolution to subsequently derive global soil moisture every two to three days with a target accuracy of 0.04 m3/m3. However, the man-made structures that dominate urban areas in many of the SMOS and SMAP radiometers pixels may confound the interpretation of their radiometric observations if not taken into account, and thus, degrade the soil moisture retrieval accuracy. This paper investigates the effect that urban areas are..
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Awarded by Australian Research Council
Funding Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Prof. A. Schneider from the University of Wisconsin-Madison for providing access to MODIS urban land cover 500 m and Dr. N. Das and Dr. S. Chan from theCalifornia Institute of Technology for their constructive comments on this study. The airborne and ancillary ground data used in this paper were collected through earlier funding by the ARC and the goodwill of many volunteers during the NAFE and AACES field campaigns.