Christoph Paulik

ASCAT Surface State Flag (SSF): Extracting Information on Surface Freeze/Thaw Conditions From Backscatter Data Using an Empirical Threshold-Analysis Algorithm

Information on soil surface state is valuable for many applications such as climate studies and monitoring of permafrost regions. C-band scatterometer data indicate good potential to deliver information on surface freeze/thaw. Variation in state or amount of water contained in the soil causes significant alteration of dielectric properties of the soil which is markedly observable in scatterometer backscattered signal. A threshold-analysis method is developed to derive a set of parameters to be used in evaluating the normalized backscatter measurements through decision trees and anomaly detection modules for determination of freeze/thaw conditions. The model parameters are extracted from two years (2007-2008) backscatter data from ASCAT scatterometer onboard Metop satellite collocated with ECMWF ReAnalysis (ERA-Interim) soil temperature. Backscatter measurements are flagged as indicator of frozen/unfrozen surface, and snowmelt or existing water on the surface. The output product, so-called surface state flag (SSF), compares well with two modeled soil temperature data sets as well as the air temperature measurements from synoptic meteorological stations across the northern hemisphere. The SSF time series are also validated with soil temperature data available at four in situ observation sites in Siberian and Alaska regions showing the overall accuracy of about 80% to 90%.

Validation of the ASCAT Soil Water Index using in situ data from the International Soil Moisture Network

Abstract Soil moisture is an essential climate variable and a key parameter in hydrology, meteorology and agriculture. Surface Soil Moisture (SSM) can be estimated from measurements taken by ASCAT onboard Metop-A and have been successfully validated by several studies. Profile soil moisture, while equally important, cannot be directly measured by remote sensing but must be modeled. The Soil Water Index (SWI) product developed for near real time applications within the framework of the GMES project geoland2 aims to provide such a modeled profile estimate using satellite data as input. It is produced from ASCAT SSM estimates using a two-layer water balance model which describes the relationship between surface and profile soil moisture as a function of time. It provides daily global data about moisture conditions for eight characteristic time lengths representing different depths. The objective of this work was to assess the overall quality of the SWI data. Furthermore we tested the assumptions of the used water balance model and checked if ancillary information about topography, water fraction and noise information are useful for identifying observations of questionable quality. SWI data from January 1st 2007 until the end of 2011 was compared to in situ soil moisture data from 664 stations belonging to 23 observation networks which are available through the International Soil Moisture Network (ISMN). These stations delivered 2081 time series at different depths which were compared to the SWI values. The average of the significant Pearson correlation coefficients was 0.54 while being greater than 0.5 for 64.4% of all time series. It was found that the characteristic time length showing the highest correlation increases with in situ observation depth, thus confirming the SWI model assumptions. Relationships of the correlation coefficients with topographic complexity, water fraction, in situ observation depth, and soil moisture noise were found.

Clarifications on the “Comparison Between SMOS, VUA, ASCAT, and ECMWF Soil Moisture Products Over Four Watersheds in U.S.”

In a recent paper, Leroux compared three satellite soil moisture data sets (SMOS, AMSR-E, and ASCAT) and ECMWF forecast soil moisture data to in situ measurements over four watersheds located in the United States. Their conclusions stated that SMOS soil moisture retrievals represent “an improvement [in RMSE] by a factor of 2-3 compared with the other products” and that the ASCAT soil moisture data are “very noisy and unstable.” In this clarification, the analysis of Leroux is repeated using a newer version of the ASCAT data and additional metrics are provided. It is shown that the ASCAT retrievals are skillful, although they show some unexpected behavior during summer for two of the watersheds. It is also noted that the improvement of SMOS by a factor of 2-3 mentioned by Leroux is driven by differences in bias and only applies relative to AMSR-E and the ECWMF data in the now obsolete version investigated by Leroux et al.

Frozen Soil Detection Based on Advanced Scatterometer Observations and Air Temperature Data as Part of Soil Moisture Retrieval

Surface soil moisture is one of the operational products derived from Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT) data. The reliability of its estimation depends on the detection of predominantly frozen conditions of the landscape (including soil and vegetation) and the presence of wet snow, which would otherwise impede the estimation. As the robust determination of the freeze/thaw (F/T) state using exclusively scatterometer measurements on a global basis is complicated due to the myriad of different climatic and land cover conditions; we propose to support the retrieval using ERA Interim temperature data. The approach is based on a probabilistic time series model, whereby backscatter and temperature data are combined to estimate the freeze/thaw state. The method is assessed with proxy F/T states derived from modeled and in situ air and soil temperature data on a global basis. These analyses show an improved consistency compared to a previously published ASCAT F/T algorithm, with typical agreements between the external data and the results of the algorithm exceeding 80%. The quantitative interpretation of these comparisons is, however, hampered by discrepancies between the F/T state derived from temperature data and the one pertinent to radar remote sensing, as the former does not account for, e.g., wet snow conditions. The inclusion of the ERA Interim temperature data can improve the accuracy of the algorithm by more than 10 percentage points in regions where freezing conditions are rare.

Methods to Remove the Border Noise From Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar Data: Implications and Importance For Time-Series Analysis

The Sentinel-1 GRD (ground range detected) Level-1 product generated by the Instrument Processing Facility of the European Space Agency has noise artifacts at the image borders, which are quite consistent at both left and right sides of the satellites cross track and at the start and end of the data take along track. The Sentinel-1 border noise troubles the creation of clean and consistence time series of backscatter. Data quality control and management become very challenging tasks, when it comes to the large-scale data processing, both in terms of spatial coverage and data volume. In this paper, we evaluate three techniques for removing the Sentinel-1 border noise and compare the results with the existing “Sentinel-1 GRD Border Noise Removal” algorithm implemented in the Sentinel-1 toolbox of the Sentinel application platform.1 Validation and evaluation of the newly proposed algorithms was done using random samples containing 1500 Sentinel-1 scenes selected from a complete Sentinel-1 archive. The newly proposed approach has successfully achieved the required level of accuracy and solved the issue of time-series anomalies due to the border noise.

Open source toolbox and web application for soil moisture validation

Validation of soil moisture observations from remote sensing platforms is quickly becoming a routine task as operational soil moisture products continue to be developed. Despite this, there are no agreed upon validation procedures or open source implementations of common tasks and methods. This makes the reproduction of scientific results difficult, especially since it is not yet common that software is include in publications. The presented work aims to improve this situation by showing an open source toolbox that makes it easy to perform common validation tasks. This toolbox is also used as the backend of a web application that aims to simplify the comparison of different validation methods.

Soil Moisture from Fusion of Scatterometer and SAR: Closing the Scale Gap with Temporal Filtering

Soil moisture is a key environmental variable, important to e.g., farmers, meteorologists, and disaster management units. We fuse surface soil moisture (SSM) estimates from spatio-temporally complementary radar sensors through temporal filtering of their joint signal and obtain a kilometre-scale, daily soil water content product named SCATSAR-SWI. With 25 km Metop ASCAT SSM and 1 km Sentinel-1 SSM serving as input, the SCATSAR-SWI is globally applicable and achieves daily full coverage over operated areas. We employ a near-real-time-capable SCATSAR-SWI algorithm on a fused 3 year ASCAT-Sentinel-1-SSM data cube over Italy, obtaining a consistent set of model parameters, unperturbed by coverage discontinuities. An evaluation of a therefrom generated SCATSAR-SWI dataset, involving a 1 km Soil Water Balance Model (SWBM) over Umbria, yields comprehensively high agreement with the reference data (median R = 0.61 vs. in situ; 0.71 vs. model; 0.83 vs. ASCAT SSM). While the Sentinel-1 signal is attenuated to some extent, the ASCAT’s signal dynamics are fully transferred to the SCATSAR-SWI and benefit from the Sentinel-1 parametrisation. Using the SM2RAIN approach, the SCATSAR-SWI shows excellent capability to reproduce 5 day-accumulated rainfall over Italy, with R = 0.89 against observed rainfall. The SCATSAR-SWI is currently in preparation towards operational product dissemination in the Copernicus Global Land Service (CGLS).

34 years of remotely sensed soil moisture: What climate signals do we (not) see?

Within the Climate Change Initiative of the European Space Agency a multi-satellite soil moisture product covering the period 1979-2010 was released. In this study we first assess its quality by comparing it with soil moisture from ground-based stations and several land surface model estimates. Secondly, the dynamics in the dataset were assessed using trend analysis and comparisons with ancillary data sets of precipitation and vegetation. Significant changes over time were found that largely correspond to changes in precipitation and vegetation vigorousness. However, the influence of changing observation density and data set quality over time need to be better understood for a more precise interpretation of the observed trends.

Intercomparison of active microwave derived surface status and MODIS land surface temperature at high latitudes

Knowledge about the freeze/thaw state of the surface is of major importance for climate modelling, hydrology and numerous other applications. In this study, a freeze/thaw state detection algorithm using the ASCAT scatterometer is compared to Land Surface Temperature (LST) from MODIS as well as to a product derived from ENVISAT ASAR data. Good agreement with the LST product was found over the study area in Northern Siberia with disagreement below 22% for all 8-day periods of 2007. SAR derived surface status can, if sufficient sampling is available, provide similar results as with ASCAT but even with higher spatial detail.