The potential of the ERS-1/2 scatterometer global soil moisture product has been shown in several studies. The ASCAT sensor on-board the METOP satellite is extending the 16 year time series of the ERS-1/2 scatterometer as a source for extracting information for ocean and land applications. Calibrated ASCAT data will continue the scatterometer global soil moisture archive while improving both th...

The natural environment and livelihoods in the Lower Mekong Basin (LMB) are significantly affected by the annual hydrological cycle. Monitoring of soil moisture as a key variable in the hydrological cycle is of great interest in a number of Hydrological and agricultural applications. In this study we evaluated the quality and spatiotemporal variability of the soil moisture product retrieved fro...

Soil moisture is an important hydrologic variable that controls various land surface processes. In spite of its importance to agriculture and drought monitoring, soil moisture information is not widely available on a regional scale. However, long-term soil moisture information is essential for agricultural drought monitoring and crop yield prediction. The hydrologic model Soil and Water Assessm...

The availability of dense temporal series of SAR acquisitions from space platforms makes possible the use of change detection techniques to monitor near-surface soil moisture content globally. The rational of this method is that temporal changes of surface roughness, canopy structure and vegetation biomass occur at longer temporal scales than soil moisture changes, excluding periods of cultivat...

The high spatio-temporal variability of soil moisture is the result of atmosphericforcing and redistribution processes related to terrain, soil, and vegetation characteristics.Despite this high variability, many field studies have shown that in the temporal domainsoil moisture measured at specific locations is correlated to the mean soil moisture contentover an area. Since the measurements take...

Carbon release from thawing permafrost soils could significantly exacerbate global warming as the active-layer deepens, exposing more carbon to decay. Plant community and soil properties provide a major control on this by influencing the maximum depth of thaw each summer (active-layer thickness; ALT), but a quantitative understanding of the relative importance of plant and soil characteristics,...

The GLOWA-initiative, funded by the German Ministry of Research and Education (BMBF), has been established to address the consequences of Global Change, which is understood as affecting future development far beyond Climate Change and to include changes in land use, population and development, on regional water resources. The GLOWA-Danube project (www.GLOWA-Danube.de) is dealing with the Upper ...

A refined hybrid polarimetric decomposition and inversion method for soil moisture estimation under vegetation is investigated for its potential to retrieve soil moisture from vegetated soils in TERENO observatories. The refined algorithm is applied on Lband fully polarimetric data acquired by DLR’s novel F-SAR sensor. Two flight and field measurement campaigns were conducted in 2011 and 2012 f...

Projected changes in the frequency and severity of droughts as a result of increase in greenhouse gases have a significant impact on the role of vegetation in regulating the global carbon cycle. Drought effect on vegetation Gross Primary Production (GPP) is usually modeled as a function of Vapor Pressure Deficit (VPD) and/or soil moisture. Climate projections suggest a strong likelihood of incr...