Soil moisture was recently included in the list of Essential Climate Variables (ECVs) that are deemed essential for IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) needs and considered feasible for global observation. ECVs data records should be as long, complete and consistent as possible, and in the case of soil moisture this...

Soil moisture products acquired from passive satellite missions have been widely applied in environmental processes. A primary challenge for the use of soil moisture products from passive sensors is their reliability. It is crucial to evaluate the reliability of those products before they can be routinely used at a global scale. In this paper, we evaluated the Soil Moisture Active/Passive (SMAP...

This paper discusses the sensitivity of scatterometric and radiometric sensors to the surface characteristics of canopy-covered soils, and compares their performances in separating crops and in measuring soil moisture and vegetation biomass.

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 ...

Rain gardens are increasing in use as the shift from gray to green infrastructure continues. Water that enters a rain garden is removed by three mechanisms: overflow an outlet, percolation underlying soil, and evapotranspiration (ET) atmosphere. Despite importance of ET aiding recover void space during time between storm events, it not often measured or calculated because so difficult do so. Th...