Assimilation of Smos Observations to Generate a Prototype SMAP Level 4 Surface and Root-Zone Soil Moisture Product.

摘要

The Soil Moisture Active and Passive (SMAP; (1)) mission is being implemented by NASA for launch in October 2014. The primary science objectives of SMAP are to enhance understanding of land surface controls on the water, energy and carbon cycles, and to determine their linkages. Moreover, the high-resolution soil moisture mapping provided by SMAP has practical applications in weather and seasonal climate prediction, agriculture, human health, drought and flood decision support. The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS; (2)) mission was launched by ESA in November 2009 and has since been observing L-band (1.4 GHz) upwelling passive microwaves. In this paper we describe our use of SMOS brightness temperature observations to generate a prototype of the planned SMAP Level 4 Surface and Root-zone Soil Moisture (L4-SM) product (5).