The effect of rock cover fraction on the retrieval of surface soil moisture at L-band

Abstract

The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission, developed by the European Space Agency (ESA), will be launched in the second half of 2009. It will be the first L-band (~1.4 GHz) passive microwave satellite specifically designed for global soil moisture observations, with an expected accuracy for the retrieved soil moisture of ~0.04 m3/m3. While passive microwave observations have been widely acknowledged to give the most accurate information on soil moisture, these sensors are characterized by low spatial resolution footprints, being on the order of 50km. One of the key difficulties with observations at this scale is the heterogeneity that exists in land surface features. However, past ..