The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission, developed by the European Space Agency (ESA), will be launched in the second half of 2009. It will be the first L-band (~1.4 GHz) passive microwave satellite specifically designed for global soil moisture observations, with an expected accuracy for the retrieved soil moisture of ~0.04 m/m. While passive microwave observations have been widely...

[1] A multi-scale soil moisture and temperature monitoring network, consisting of 55 soil moisture and temperature measurement stations, has been established in central Tibetan Plateau (TP). In this study, the station-averaged surface soil moisture data from the network are used to evaluate four soil moisture products retrieved from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer-Earth Observing Sys...

In regions affected by seasonal and permanently frozen conditions soil moisture influences the thermal regime of the ground as well as its ice content, which is one of the main factors controlling the sensitivity of mountain permafrost to climate changes. In this study, several well established soil moisture monitoring techniques were combined with data from geophysical measurements to assess t...

The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity Mission (SMOS) acquires surface soil moisture data of global coverage every three days. Product validation for a range of climate and environmental conditions across continents is a crucial step. For this purpose, a soil moisture and soil temperature sensor network was established in the Skjern River Catchment, Denmark. The objectives of this article are to ...

Soil moisture plays a key role in vegetation restoration and ecosystem stability in arid and semiarid regions. The response of soil moisture to rainfall pulses is an important hydrological process, which is strongly influenced by land use during the implementation of vegetation restoration. In this study, vertical soil moisture variations of woodland (Pinus tabulaeformis), native grassland (Sti...

This paper investigates the ERS Scatterometer soil moisture products precision over a half-degree region in Southwestern France. Based on a high resolution soil moisture simulation (1km2) validated at the local scale, the ERS-scat product is assessed at its own resolution (about 50x50 km2). The study points out the suitable quality of the surface soil moisture product (root mean square error eq...

Daily transpiration rate was decreased by low soil moisture, phenylmercuric acetate (PMA) in combination with kaolinite, Mobileaf (a filmforming wax emulsion manufactured by the Mobil Oil Co.), PMA alone, and kaolinite alone in this order. At high soil moisture, dry matter was decreased by PMA but was increased by Mobileaf and by PMA + kaolinite combination. At low soil moisture, dry matter was...

Remotely sensed soil moisture products derived from the Advanced SCATterometer (ASCAT) and from the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) radiometer are analyzed and compared. The comparison has been carried out within the framework of an activity aiming at validating the EUMETSAT Hydrology Satellite Application Facility (H-SAF) soil moisture products derived from ASCAT over Europe and North ...

Soil particle size distribution PSD i.e., clay, silt, sand, and rock contents information is one of critical factors for understanding water cycle since it affects almost all of water cycle processes, e.g., drainage, runoff, soil moisture, evaporation, and evapotranspiration. With information about soil PSD, we can estimate almost all soil hydraulic properties e.g., saturated soil moisture, fie...

High quality soil moisture datasets are required for various environmental applications. The launch of the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2) on board the Global Change Observation Mission 1—Water (GCOM-W1) in May 2012 has provided global near-surface soil moisture data, with an average revisit frequency of two days. Since AMSR2 is a new passive microwave system in operation, it i...