The ASCAT Soil Moisture Product: A Review of its Specifications, Validation Results, and Emerging Applications

Many physical, chemical and biological processes taking place at the land surface are strongly influenced by the amount of water stored within the upper soil layers. Therefore, many scientific disciplines require soil moisture observations for developing, evaluating and improving their models. One of these disciplines is meteorology where soil moisture is important due to its control on the exchange of heat and water between the soil and the lower atmosphere. Soil moisture observations may thus help to improve the forecasts of air temperature, air humidity and precipitation. However, until recently, soil moisture observations had only been available over a limited number of regional soil moisture networks.…

• EC
  European Commission
• AS
  Austrian Science Fund
• EO
  European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites