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Talks and Poster Presentations (with Proceedings-Entry):

M. Doubkova, A. Bartsch, D. Sabel, W. Wagner:
"An operational soil moisture product from ENVISAT ASAR GM for Australia";
Talk: EGU 2009, Vienna; 2009-04-19 - 2009-04-24; in: "Geophysical Research Abstracts", 11 (2009), Paper ID EGU2009-9933, 1 pages.



English abstract:
Soil moisture is a key element in the global cycles of water, energy and carbon and belongs to the Essential
Climate Variables defined by the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS). Soil moisture represents a switch that
controls the proportion of rainfall that percolates, runs off, or evaporates from land. Its quantitative representation
can bring further improvement in hydrological monitoring and modelling.
Since 1970īs the microwave technology dominated the soil moisture retrieval. A variety of coarse resolution
datasets became available from active and passive microwave systems (ERS-1/2, METOP ASCAT or AMSR-E)
and the potential of these datasets for improvement in hydrological, climatological, and vegetation studies has
been amply demonstrated.
To address the needs of the hydrological community for medium resolution soil moisture dataset an approach
developed at the TU WIEN for the coarse resolution ERS/METOP datasets has been transferred to medium
resolution SAR data. This work was performed within the ESA Tiger Innovator project SHARE. The used
sensor is the ENVISAR ASAR. Its Global Mode with 1 km spatial resolution provides frequent data coverage
which allows for detection of the highly variable soil moisture patterns. The original product is available for
the region of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) since June 2007 and is regularly updated. In June 2008 a similar service has been implemented for the entire Australian
continent with exception of Tasmania. The new dataset provides twice weekly measurements for 92% of the
continent leaving the reminding regions with at least 1 acquisition a week. The datasets also allow for downscaling
of the coarser resolution datasets (ERS, ASCAT) for operational applications.


Electronic version of the publication:
http://publik.tuwien.ac.at/files/PubDat_175568.pdf


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