In active (SAR) and passive (radiometer) microwave remote sensing polarimetry provides an innovative observation space for analyses of land surface scattering pointing towards a combined (active-passive) soil moisture estimation on agricultural ground. In order to investigate the potential of a polarimetric, active-passive approach for soil moisture estimation, a unique data set was acquired at...

The sensitivity of land surface model parameters is usually examined for one parameter at a time in response to changes in observation data and/or the model estimated output. This parameter independence approach assumes that there are limited interactions between model parameters a precondition which is highly unlikely for land surface models. Additionally, the model parameter values are widely...

Using a succession of 24 h Weather Research and Forecasting model (WRF) simulations, we investigate the sensitivity to initial soil moisture of a short-range hightemperature weather event that occurred in late July 2003 in East China. The initial soil moisture (SMOIS) in the Noah land surface scheme is adjusted (relative to the control run, CTL) for four groups of simulations: DRY25 (−25 %), DR...

The annual cycles of soil moisture and NO2 have been analysed across the climate zones of West Africa using two satellite data sets (OMI on AURA and ASCAT on MetOp-A). Exploring the sources and sinks for NO2 it is clear that the densely populated urban cities including Lagos and Abuja had the highest mean NO2 concentrations (>1.8 × 10 15 molecules cm -2 ) indicative of the anthropogenic urban e...

abstract infiltration is one of the most important phenomena which is affected by the soil physical and hydraulic characteristics. measurement of infiltration needs the high cost and is time consuming, therefore estimation of infiltration is necessary. also, due to variability of soil moisture, it is important to determine the appropriate model for the estimating the infiltration rate. the pres...

A primitive equation model is used to study the sensitivity of baroclinic wave life cycles to the initial latitude-height distribution of humidity. Diabatic heating is parametrized only as a consequence of condensation in regions of large-scale ascent. Experiments are performed in which the initial relative humidity is a simple function of model level, and in some cases latitude bands are speci...