[Back]

W. Dorigo:
"Microwave remote sensing of soil moisture for climate research";
Talk: GEO 441.1: Colloquium in Remote Sensing, Zurich (invited); 2014-05-15.

Soil moisture is both a manifestation and a driver of the complex interactions between the water, energy, and biogeochemical cycles at the land surface. Monitoring long-term changes in its mean values and variability is thus pivotal for understanding the effects of climate change. To this purpose, within the Climate Change Initiative (CCI) of the European Space Agency the first multi-decadal (1979-present) soil moisture data set was released, which amalgamates global observations from various space-borne radiometers and scatterometers. This presentation gives an overview of the soil moisture dataset, including its strengths and weaknesses, and shows its potential for improving our understanding of the climate system, including land-atmosphere interactions, droughts, and the role of soil moisture in driving vegetation growth.