Climate change and hydrological cycles can critically impact future water resources.\nUncertainties in current climate models result in disagreement on the amount of water resources.\nSoil moisture and vegetation water content are key environmental variables on evaporation and\ntranspiration at the landââ?¬â??atmosphere boundary. Radar remote sensing helps to improve our estimate\nof water resources spatially and temporally. This work proposes a backscattered power formulation\nfor the Ku-band. Li et al. (2010) retrieved soil moisture and vegetation water content values using\nWindsat data and simultaneous collocated QuikSCAT backscattered power are used to estimate\ndifferent parameters of backscatter formulation. These parameters are used to estimate soil moisture\nand vegetation water content using QuikSCAT power everywhere and every day during the summer\nseason. The 2-folded cross validation method is used to evaluate the performance of soil moisture\nand vegetation water content retrieval. A relatively large correlation is observed between vegetation\nwater content using WindSat and QuikSCAT data in land classes of Evergreen Needleleaf, Evergreen\nBroadleaf, Deciduous Broadleaf, and Mixed Forests. Similarly, the retrieved soil moisture using\nQuikSCAT in areas with bare surface fraction of greater than 60% shows relatively high correlation\nwithWindSat values. QuikSCAT satellite collects data over land globally almost every day. Therefore,\nQuikSCAT data can be used to generate a global map of soil moisture and vegetation water content\ndaily from 2000 to 2009.
Loading....