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A. Bartsch, J. Boike, D. Sabel, W. Wagner:
"Monitoring of Surface Wetness from active microwave satellite data in permafrost regions";
Talk: AGU Fall Meeting San Francisco, San Francisco; 2008-12-15 - 2008-12-19.

Soil moisture content impacts land surface energy dynamics, regional runoff dynamics and vegetation productivity. Coarse to medium resolution data from active microwave instruments onboard satellites which are currently in space are able to provide such valuable information for operational use. Scatterometer (ERS, Metop ASCAT) can be applied on regional to global scale. ScanSAR systems are suitable for regional to continental monitoring and for the investigation of scaling issues. The original approach which was developed for scatterometer data (Wagner et al. 1999) has been transferred to ScanSAR data within the framework of the ESA Tiger innovator project SHARE. Data from the ENVISAT ASAR instrument operating in Global Mode (1km resolution) have not only been used over the southern African subcontinent, but also over entire Australia and within other regional studies. Current research focuses on the validation and investigation of scaling issues of satellite derived surface wetness in permafrost environment. A comparison to soil moisture measurements has been carried out over the Lena- Delta, Russia. Measurements are from a site on Samoylov Island, which is characterized by polygonal tundra. Best aggreement of the 1km resolution satellit data was found for polygon centres, with a Pearson correlation of 0.72. Timeseries analyses from this and other sites in Siberia will be presented.