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Publications in Scientific Journals:

C. Albergel, C. Rüdiger, D. Carrer, J.C. Calvet, N. Fritz, V. Naeimi, Z. Bartalis, S. Hasenauer:
"An evaluation of ASCAT surface soil moisture products with in-situ observations in southwestern France";
Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 13 (2009), 2; 115 - 124.



English abstract:
A long term data acquisition effort of profile soil
moisture is currently underway at 13 automatic weather stations
located in Southwestern France. In this study, the soil
moisture measured in-situ at 5 cm is used to evaluate the normalised
surface soil moisture (SSM) estimates derived from
coarse-resolution (25 km) active microwave data of the ASCAT
scatterometer instrument (onboard METOP), issued by
EUMETSAT for a period of 6 months (April-September)
in 2007. The seasonal trend is removed from the satellite
and in-situ time series by considering scaled anomalies. One
station (Mouthoumet) of the ground network, located in a
mountainous area, is removed from the analysis as very few
ASCAT SSM estimates are available. No correlation is found
for the station of Narbonne, which is close to the Mediterranean
sea. On the other hand, nine stations present significant
correlation levels. For two stations, a significant correlation
is obtained when considering only part of the ASCAT
data. The soil moisture measured in-situ at those stations, at
30 cm, is used to estimate the characteristic time length (T )
of an exponential filter applied to the ASCAT product. The
best correlation between a soil water index derived from ASCAT
and the in-situ soil moisture observations at 30 cm is
obtained with a T -value of 14 days.


Electronic version of the publication:
http://www.hydrol-earth-syst-sci.net/13/115/2009/hess-13-115-2009.pdf


Created from the Publication Database of the Vienna University of Technology.