Active microwave remote sensing observations hold the potential for efficient and reliable mapping of spatial soil moisture distributions. However, soil moisture retrievals from microwave remote sensing techniques are typically complex because of the inherent difficulty in characterizing the interactions among land surface parameters that contribute to the retrieval process. Therefore adequate ...

Monitoring soil moisture dynamics from local to global scales is essential for a wide range of applications. The field of remote sensing of soil moisture has expanded greatly and the first dedicated soil moisture satellite missions (SMOS, SMAP) were launched, and new missions, such as SENTINEL-1 provide long-term perspectives for land surface monitoring. This special issue aims to summarize the...

Understanding the spatial and temporal variations of soil moisture is crucial for the land surface processes and their management. Accurate estimation of spatial and temporal variations of soil moisture is important for various hydrological studies also. Recently, remote sensing techniques have been used to estimate soil moisture. Estimation of soil moisture by remote sensing techniques provide...

Spatial and temporal soil moisture dynamics are critically needed to improve the parameterization for hydrological and meteorological modeling processes. This study evaluates the statistical spatial structure of large-scale observed and simulated estimates of soil moisture under pre- and post-precipitation event conditions. This large scale variability is a crucial in calibration and validation...

Soil moisture is a key variable for the water and energy exchanges at the land surface. The determination of soil moisture dynamics from space is one of the most prominent, but also most challenging applications for recent active microwave sensor systems. Since the launch of ENVISAT ASAR, more than 4 years of data is available for the retrieval of soil moisture information. The wide area covera...

The Kalman filter assimilation technique is applied to a simplified soil moisture model for retrieval of the soil moisture profile from near-surface soil moisture measurements. First, the simplified soil moisture model is developed, based on an approximation to the Buckingham–Darcy equation. This model is then used in a 12month one-dimensional field application, with updating at 1-, 5-, 10-, an...

The spatial pattern of soil moisture varies at different scales due to evapo-transpiration and precipitation which are transformed by topography, soil texture, and vegetation. The mapping of soil moisture by remote sensing has several advantages over conventional field measurement techniques especially in the case of heterogeneous landscapes. However, validation of low resolution satellite soil...

This research investigates the interannual variability of soil moisture as related to large-scale climate variability and also evaluates the spatial and temporal variability of modeled deep layer (40–140 cm) soil moisture in the Upper Colorado River Basin (UCRB). A three layers hydrological model VIC-3L (Variable Infiltration Capacity Model – 3 layers) was used to generate soil moisture in the ...

Passive microwave sensors have many advantages including the ability to directly measured soil moisture at large spatial scales regardless of weather conditions or time of day. However, microwave-sensed soil moisture’s inevitable limitation is that it cannot describe hydrology at the watershed because its retrieved soil moisture scale is too large. Thus, microwave-sensed soil moisture requires ...

This paper presents an approach denominated Group Inversion Approach (GIA) which aims at detecting soil moisture temporal invariants, i.e., the stable temporal soil moisture locations, by using mainly remotely sensed data. The soil moisture temporal invariants are those locations where independently of the absolute value changes, the relative spatial distribution of soil moisture remains almost...