Soil moisture (SM) and vegetation optical depth (VOD) are essential variables in the terrestrial ecosystem. The multi-frequency radiometers AMSR-E AMSR2 provide >20 years of data records, enabling development long-term SM VOD products. Most current retrieval algorithms either only focus on or VOD, generally ignore polarization simplify frequency dependence effects for reducing unknowns facilita...

A systematic and timely monitoring of land surface parameters that affect the hydrological cycle at local and global scales is of primary importance in obtaining a better understanding of geophysical processes and in managing environmental resources as well as natural disasters. Soil moisture and snow water equivalent are two quantities that play a major role in these applications. In this pape...

[1] Arguably, the most remarkable manifestation of change in the polar regions is the rapid decline in the Arctic perennial ice cover. Changes in the global sea ice cover, however, have been more modest, being only slightly negative in the Northern Hemisphere and even slightly positive in the Southern Hemisphere, the significance of which has not been adequately assessed because of unknown erro...

The authors evaluated several land surface variables from the Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA) product that are important for global ecological and hydrological studies, including daily maximum (Lnax) and minimum (Lnin) surface air temperatures, atmosphere vapor pressure deficit (VPD), incident solar radiation (SWrad), and surface soil moisture. The M ERRA...

Spaceborne microwave remote sensing is widely used to monitor global environmental changes for understanding hydrological, ecological, and climate processes. A new global land parameter data record (LPDR) was generated using similar calibrated, multifrequency brightness temperature (Tb) retrievals from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS (AMSR-E) and the Advanced Microwave Scanni...

Some techniques which average multiple AMSR satellite data passes into daily sets create images with diminished temporal resolution. This results from averaging data of multiple overlapping passes separated by many hours. Overlap can be reduced by instead grouping data according to local time of day. This new method maximizes temporal resolution by decreasing both the number and the temporal va...

Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) is an increasing problem particularly for Earth Observation using Microwave Radiometry. RFI has been observed, example, at L-band by the ESA’s SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity) Explorer NASA’s SMAP Active Passive) Aquarius missions, as well C-band AMSR-E AMRS-2; 10.7 GHz 18.7 AMSR-E, AMRS-2, WindSat GMI [1], [2]. Therefore, systems dedicate...

Within the dynamic seasonal ice cover of Hudson Bay, Kivalliq Polynya is a large latent heat polynya that forms throughout winter in northwest as result strong northwesterly offshore surface winds. Polynyas are known to be physically, biologically, and geochemically important contribute regional mass balance; however, has yet characterized terms spatiotemporal variability production. Using thin...