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R. Smith, M. Salloway, P. Berry, M. Dowson, S. Hahn, W. Wagner, A. Egibo, J. Benveniste:
"Soil Moisture from Satellite Radar Altimetry (SMALT)";
Poster: ESA Living Planet Symposium 2013, Edinburgh; 09-09-2013 - 09-13-2013; in: "Proceedings of ESA Living Planet Symposium 2013", L. Ouwehand (ed.); ESA, Noordwijk, The Netherlands (2013), ISBN: 978-92-9221-286-5; 4 pages.

Soil surface moisture is a key scientific parameter; however, it is extremely difficult to measure remotely, particularly in arid and semi-arid terrain. This paper outlines the development of a novel methodology to generate soil moisture estimates in these regions from multi-mission satellite radar altimetry. Key to this approach is the development of detailed DRy Earth ModelS (DREAMS), which encapsulate the detailed and intricate surface brightness variations over the Earth´s land surface, resulting from changes in surface roughness and composition.
These DREAMS are complicated to build and require multiple stages of processing and manual intervention. However, this approach obviates the requirement for detailed ground truth to populate theoretical models, facilitating derivation of surface soil moisture estimates
over arid regions, where detailed survey data are generally not available. DREAMS have been produced over a number of deserts worldwide and a selection are presented in this paper.
An overview of the SMALT processing scheme, covering the progression of the data from altimeter sigma0 through to final soil moisture estimate, is included along with example SMALT products. In order to validate these products comparisons with other remote sensing techniques and in-situ data have been performed over a number of desert regions. SMALT products are made freely available to the scientific community through the website http://tethys.eaprs.cse.dmu.ac.uk/SMALT