Wednesday 29 July 2015

Welcome to the SMAPEx-5 blog!

 
This blog is intended to give live updates on progress of the SMAPEx-5 field campaign near Narrandera NSW Australia. This is the 5th in a series of Soil Moisture Active Passive Experiments (www.smapex.monash.edu.au) in support of the SMAP mission (smap.jpl.nasa.gov) launched by NASA on 31st January 2015 for global measurement of soil moisture at 10km spatial resolution. The first three field campaigns were focussed on development and validation of pre-launch downscaling algorithms using airborne simulations of the SMAP data stream, while the fourth campaign conducted in May 2015 (the austral autumn) was the first real demonstration of how successful the SMAP mission is to map soil moisture at such high resolution. To further validate SMAP products under different soil moisture and vegetation conditions, this campaign was designed to re-sample the same sampling area in the austral spring.
  

 


The airborne L-band (1.4 GHz) brightness temperature observations at ~1km resolution and L-band (1.2 GHz) backscatter observations at ~10-30m will be collected in coincidence with the coverage of SMAP, over a 71×89km area covering a number of SMAP 36km, 9km, and 3km pixels with a variety of land use and topography scenarios. The intensive ground soil moisture sampling will be conducted together with the flights over six 3.2×3.8km focus farms. The regional soil moisture, vegetation, surface roughness sampling will be conducted across the ground sampling area between flights. In addition, vehicle based L-band radiometer, GNSS-R sensor, thermal infrared sensor, multi-spectral sensors and EM38 will be used to observe soil moisture at high spatial resolution
 
  
Please keep coming back to see how we are going focused on validation of these algorithms with actual SMAP data!