88th Annual Meeting (20-24 January 2008)

Wednesday, 23 January 2008: 11:45 AM
Blending Soil Moisture Retrievals from TMI, AMSR-E and WindSat Observations and Noah LSM Simulations for a Combined Soil Moisture Data Product
223 (Ernest N. Morial Convention Center)
Xiwu Zhan, NOAA/NESDIS, Camp Springs, MD; and T. J. Jackson, J. Meng, M. Cosh, F. Weng, D. Tarpley, and K. Mitchell
Satellite soil moisture data products have been desired since the launch of the Scanning Multi-channel Microwave Radiometer (SMMR) onboard Nimbus-7 satellite in October 1978. The low frequency channel observations of the currently flying microwave sensors (the TRMM Microwave Imager-TMI; Aqua Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer-AMSR-E, and NRL's WindSat) have been used to retrieval surface soil moisture. However, all of these soil moisture retrievals have not been used in operational numerical weather or climate predictions because they are not either steadily available or proven to be reliable. This study intends to cross-validate the NASA AMSR-E soil moisture data product with field measurements, Noah land surface model simulations, and Noah LSM CDF-matched AMSR-E soil moisture product. An single-channel soil moisture retrieval algorithm is used to generate soil moisture data product TMI, AMSR-E and WindSat and validated with the same field measurements and Noah LSM simulations. The results indicate that the CDF-matched soil moisture satellite retrievals may have larger errors than the original retrievals if the original retrievals are significantly biased or damped. The combined soil moisture retrievals using the single-channel retrieval algorithm may have small departure from the field measurements and the Noah LSM simulations.

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