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Publications in Scientific Journals:

V. Naeimi, Z. Bartalis, W. Wagner:
"ASCAT Soil Moisture: An Assessment of the Data Quality and Consistency with the ERS Scatterometer Heritage";
Journal Of Hydrometeorology, 10 (2009), 2; 555 - 563.



English abstract:
This article presents a first comparison between remotely sensed surface soil moisture retrieved with the
European Remote Sensing Satellite-2 (ERS-2) scatterometer (SCAT) and the corresponding product provided
by the Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT) on board Meteorological Operation satellite (MetOp), the
first of a series of three satellites providing, among other things, continuity of global soil moisture observations
using active microwave techniques for the next 15 yr. Three months of collocated 2007 data were used from
the SCAT and ASCAT, limited to two study regions with different land cover composition. The result of the
assessment is satisfactory and ensures consistency ofmigrating soilmoisture retrieval fromthe long-termSCAT
dataset to ASCAT measurements. The influence of a shift of observation incidence angle ranges between the
two instrument generations was not found to be significant for the soil moisture retrieval. The correlation
coefficients (R) between two relative soil moisture (normalized water content) datasets compared in different
incidence angle ranges are around 0.90 with root-mean-square error (RMSE) values in the order of 8.5. Results
are expected to improve slightly further once the calibration of the ASCAT instrument is finalized.


"Official" electronic version of the publication (accessed through its Digital Object Identifier - DOI)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/2008JHM1051.1


Created from the Publication Database of the Vienna University of Technology.