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W. Wagner:
"Towards Sentinel-1 Soil Moisture Data Services: The Approach taken by the Earth Observation Data Centre for Water Resources Monitoring";
Talk: Satellite soil moisture validation & application workshop 2014, Amsterdam, the Netherlands; 2014-07-10 - 2014-07-11.

The experiences gathered with the ENVISAT ASAR have demonstrated that Sentinel-1, its successor SAR mission, will be well suited for global monitoring of soil moisture at a scale of 1 km or higher. Sentinel-1 will thus provide soil moisture data at a much higher spatial resolution than other active and passive microwave sensors such as ASCAT, SMOS, AMSR-2, or even SMAP. The high spatial resolution of Sentinel-1 comes however at a cost. Firstly, the data volume acquired by Sentinel-1 will be very large, in the order of 1-2 Terabyte per day; over the complete mission the data archive will grow to several tens of Petabyte. Secondly, the soil moisture retrieval algorithms for Sentinel-1 will have to become more elaborated as compared to the lower resolution sensors in order to account for the higher diversity of land surface processes at finer scales. The high costs to establish such a large data centre and building up fully-automatic processing chains for the provision of Sentinel-1 soil moisture data services can hardly be stemmed by one organisation alone. Therefore, close cooperation between public and private partners is deemed essential if one wants to succeed in building up robust and reliable soil moisture data services for Sentinel-1. This is the approach taken by the Earth Observation Data Centre for Water Resources Monitoring (EODC) which aims to foster the use of earth observation (EO) data for monitoring of global water resources. This presentation will introduce EODC and its partners, and describe the plans for the roll out of the first Sentinel-1 soil moisture services.