References

HESS

Hydrology and Earth System Sciences

HESS

Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci.

1607-7938

Copernicus Publications

Göttingen, Germany

10.5194/hess-14-141-2010

Soil moisture active and passive microwave products: intercomparison and evaluation over a Sahelian site

Gruhier

¹ de Rosnay

² Hasenauer

³ Holmes

⁴ de Jeu

⁵ Kerr

¹ Mougin

¹ Njoku

⁶ Timouk

¹ Wagner

³ Zribi

Centre d'Études Spatiales de la BIOsphère, UMR 5126 (CNRS, CNES, IRD, UPS), Toulouse, France

European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, Reading, UK

Institute of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, Vienna University of Technology, Vienna, Austria

USDA-ARS Hydrology and Remote Sensing Laboratory, Beltsville, USA

Faculty of Earth and Life Sciences, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, USA

22 01 2010

14 1 141 156

2010

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this licence, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

This article is available from https://hess.copernicus.org/articles/14/141/2010/hess-14-141-2010.html

The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://hess.copernicus.org/articles/14/141/2010/hess-14-141-2010.pdf

This paper presents a comparison and an evaluation of five soil moisture products based on satellite-based passive and active microwave measurements. Products are evaluated for 2005–2006 against ground measurements obtained from the soil moisture network deployed in Mali (Sahel) in the framework of the African Monsoon Multidisciplinary Analysis project. It is shown that the accuracy of the soil moisture products is sensitive to the retrieval approach as well as to the sensor type (active or passive) and to the signal frequency (from 5.6 GHz to 18.8 GHz). The spatial patterns of surface soil moisture are compared between the different products at meso-scale (14.5° N–17.5° N and 2° W–1° W). A general good consistency between the different satellite soil moisture products is shown in terms of meso-scale spatial distribution, in particular after convective rainfall occurrences. Comparison to ground measurement shows that although soil moisture products obtained from satellite generally over-estimate soil moisture values during the dry season, most of them capture soil moisture temporal variations in good agreement with ground station measurements.

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