Nearly one-half of the earth’s terrestrial surface is susceptible to drought, which can have significant social, economic, and environmental impacts. Therefore, it is important to develop better descriptions and models of the processes linking the land surface and atmosphere during drought. Using data collected during the International H2O Project, the study presented here investigates the effe...

Active microwave remote sensing observations of backscattering, such as C-band vertically polarized synthetic aperture radar (SAR) observations from the second European remote sensing (ERS-2) satellite, have the potential to measure moisture content in a near-surface layer of soil. However, SAR backscattering observations are highly dependent on topography, soil texture, surface roughness and s...

[1] An analytical algorithm for the determination of land surface temperature and soil moisture from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission/Microwave Imager (TRMM/TMI) remote sensing data has been developed in this study. The error analyses indicate that the uncertainties of the enrolled parameters will not cause serious errors in the proposed algorithm. By applying the proposed algorithm to T...

Despite the importance of the coupling between vegetation dynamics and root-zone soil moisture in land-atmosphere interactions, there is no land data assimilation system (LDAS) that currently addresses this issue, limiting the capacity to positively impact weather and seasonal forecasting. We develop a new LDAS that can improve the skill of an ecohydrological model to simulate simultaneously su...

Spatial distributed information of isochronal surface soil moisture is very important to compensate the inaccuracy of initial conditions and the uncertainty of parameters in hydrological models at the landscape scale. In this paper the conceptual procedure to derive spatial distributed surface soil moisture values from synthetic aperture radar data by using ancillary optical remote sensing data...

An experiment was performed in Northern Maine recently to evaluate the use of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data in the measurement of soil moisture content in small area plots with varying surface cover and at various subsurface depths. Ground preparation efforts involved defining six contiguous 30 m x 30 m plots with three surface cover conditions: bare tilled soil, short grass and forest. F...

An experiment was performed in Northern Maine recently to evaluate the use of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data in the measurement of soil moisture content in small area plots with varying surface cover and at various subsurface depths. Ground preparation efforts involved defining six contiguous 30 m x 30 m plots with three surface cover conditions: bare tilled soil, short grass and forest. F...

Airborne remote sensing provides a viable option for high resolution mapping of nearsurface soil moisture that allows larger areas to be covered in greater spatial and temporal detail than has hereto been possible from traditional ground based techniques. However, the current retrieval algorithms require information on near-surface soil temperature and vegetation water content in order to estim...