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Utilization of Ancillary Data Sets for Conceptual SMAP Mission Algorithm Development and Product GenerationThe planned Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission is one of the first Earth observation satellites being developed by NASA in response to the National Research Council's Decadal Survey, Earth Science and Applications from Space: National Imperatives for the Next Decade and Beyond [1]. Scheduled to launch late in 2014, the proposed SMAP mission would provide high resolution and frequent revisit global mapping of soil moisture and freeze/thaw state, utilizing enhanced Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) mitigation approaches to collect new measurements of the hydrological condition of the Earth's surface. The SMAP instrument design incorporates an L-band radar (3 km) and an L band radiometer (40 km) sharing a single 6-meter rotating mesh antenna to provide measurements of soil moisture and landscape freeze/thaw state [2]. These observations would (1) improve our understanding of linkages between the Earth's water, energy, and carbon cycles, (2) benefit many application areas including numerical weather and climate prediction, flood and drought monitoring, agricultural productivity, human health, and national security, (3) help to address priority questions on climate change, and (4) potentially provide continuity with brightness temperature and soil moisture measurements from ESA's SMOS (Soil Moisture Ocean Salinity) and NASA's Aquarius missions. In the planned SMAP mission prelaunch time frame, baseline algorithms are being developed for generating (1) soil moisture products both from radiometer measurements on a 36 km grid and from combined radar/radiometer measurements on a 9 km grid, and (2) freeze/thaw products from radar measurements on a 3 km grid. These retrieval algorithms need a variety of global ancillary data, both static and dynamic, to run the retrieval models, constrain the retrievals, and provide flags for indicating retrieval quality. The choice of which ancillary dataset to use for a particular SMAP product would be based on a number of factors, including its availability and ease of use, its inherent error and resulting impact on the overall soil moisture or freeze/thaw retrieval accuracy, and its compatibility with similar choices made by the SMOS mission. All decisions regarding SMAP ancillary data sources would be fully documented by the SMAP Project and made available to the user community.
Document ID
20150005750
Acquisition Source
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Document Type
Conference Paper
External Source(s)
Authors
O'Neill, P.
(NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Greenbelt, MD, United States)
Podest, E.
(Jet Propulsion Lab., California Inst. of Tech. Pasadena, CA, United States)
Date Acquired
April 16, 2015
Publication Date
August 1, 2011
Subject Category
Earth Resources And Remote Sensing
Meeting Information
Meeting: IGARSS: International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium
Location: Sendai
Country: Japan
Start Date: August 1, 2011
End Date: August 5, 2011
Sponsors: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Distribution Limits
Public
Copyright
Other
Keywords
freeze/thaw
soil moisture
frozen ground
Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP)
transient water

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