Improving retrievals of soil moisture from active and passive microwave satellites

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In early 2015, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration will launch the Soil Moisture Active Passive satellite platform. Products that will be developed from the data collected from this satellite system will include a global estimate of soil wetness at relatively high spatial resolutions (3x3 kilometres at finest scale). Canadian scientists have great interest in the products from this satellite as observations of soil moisture have been found to be important for improving weather and climate forecasts, detection of drought and to improve the prediction of floods. Efforts to validate the products for various applications over Canada are currently concentrated in agricultural regions. However, knowledge of the soil moisture state is also of great significance to boreal and arctic regions. Numerous processes including permafrost melt, greenhouse gas emissions and forest fires have well established connections to water availability in the root zone. Unfortunately, there is currently a lack of observations in Canada’s northern regions where the data from the sensors aboard this satellite can evaluated and potentially improved. The purpose of the proposed research will be to establish networks for the evaluation of the soil moisture products to be released by the SMAP science team over sub-arctic boreal and arctic tundra regions in Canada. Based on these evaluations and detailed site characterization improvements to the soil moisture retrievals over these sites will be developed.