ISSN 2360-7971
Abstract
Soil moisture constitutes an important contribution to the knowledge of a part of the water balance at the global, regional, and local scales. Hence, this information is widely used in hydrological applications helping to quantify the diverse components of the water balance – infiltration, surface runoff, evaporation, deep percolation, and changes in water content. Remote sensing provides researchers and the community with the possibility to monitor changes in land and ocean around the globe, especially where in-situ observations are limited or non-existent. Microwave remote sensing enables satellite to get observations day and night regardless of the lighting conditions, and at selected frequencies, microwave emissions have a good cloud penetration which proves to be an immensely advantage over the oceans, which are on average 70% covered by clouds. We can mention the recent success: 2009: ASCAT soil moisture product available in NRT, 2010: First Soil Moisture Network (ISMN) takes off 2011: International first merged multi-radiometer soil moisture product, 2012: First ECV soil moisture data set covering 1978-2010 released, 2013: Launch of Sentinel-1.
Keywords: Agriculture, data modeling, hydraulic, microwave, water