The work reports validation of numerical weather forecasts (NWF), QuikSCAT-based wind speed and AMSR-E sea surface temperature (SST) for the surface atmospheric boundary layer in the Indian sector of the Southern Ocean under the International Polar Year. The database consists of wind speed, air temperature, relative humidity, sea level pressure collected along the ship route from Durban (32.4°S...

A new automated method enabling consistent satellite assessment of seasonal lake ice phenology at 5 km resolution was developed for all lake pixels (water coverage ≥ 90 %) in the Northern Hemisphere using 36.5 GHz H-polarized brightness temperature (Tb) observations from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS and Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR-E/2) sensors. The lake ...

Rainfall-induced shallow landslides are one of the most frequent hazards on slanted terrains. Intense storms with high-intensity and long-duration rainfall have high potential to trigger rapidly moving soil masses due to changes in pore water pressure and seepage forces. Nevertheless, regardless of the intensity and/or duration of the rainfall, shallow landslides are influenced by antecedent so...

The large observation footprint of low-frequency satellite microwave emissions complicates the interpretation of near-surface soil moisture retrievals. While the effect of sub-footprint lateral heterogeneity is relatively limited under unsaturated conditions, open water bodies (if not accounted for) cause a strong positive bias in the satellite-derived soil moisture retrieval. This bias is gene...

The Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2) onboard the Global Change Observation Mission 1–Water (GCOM-W1) was launched by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) in May 2012. The AMSR2 is the follow-on model of the AMSR-Earth Observing System (AMSR-E) onboard the Aqua satellite. An assessment of the reliability of the soil moisture estimations from the newly launched passive se...

[1] Diurnal temperature variability in the top 50 m of the ocean is assessed by pairing Argo temperature profiles with geographically colocated Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for the Earth Observing System (AMSR-E) sea surface temperatures (SSTs) collected within 24 h of each other. Data pairs with time separations of up to 3 h are used to evaluate systematic differences between the two...

The Optimal Estimation (OE) technique is developed within the European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative (ESA-CCI) to retrieve subskin Sea Surface Temperature (SST) from AQUA’s Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer—Earth Observing System (AMSR-E). A comprehensive matchup database with drifting buoy observations is used to develop and test the OE setup. It is shown that it is essential to ...