The development of passive microwave sensors traces back to Robert Dicke’s pioneering experiments in the 1940s. Since then, microwave radiometry has evolved into a key tool for Earth observation, strengthened by data from multiple satellite mis...
In recent years, different space agencies have launched satellite missions that carry passive microwave instruments on-board that can measure surface soil moisture. Three currently operational missions are the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS)...
The Global Flood Detection Systems (GFDS) currently operated at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) is a satellite-based observation system that provides daily stream flow measurements of global rivers. The system was initiall...
In this study, an existing combination approach that maximizes temporal correlations is used to combine six passive microwave satellite soil moisture products from 1998 to 2015 to assess its added value in long-term applications. Five of the products...
Passive microwave measurements have been available on satellites back to the 1970s, first flown on research satellites developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Since then, several other sensors have been flown to retriev...
The Federated Satellite System mission (FSSCat), winner of the 2017 Copernicus Masters Competition and the first ESA third-party mission based on CubeSats, aimed to provide coarse-resolution soil moisture estimations and sea ice concentration maps by...
The understanding of land surface-atmosphere energy exchange is extremely important for predicting climate change and weather impacts, particularly the influence of soil moisture content (SMC) on hydrometeorological and ecological processes, which ar...
Vegetation is a key element in the energy, water and carbon balances over the land surfaces and is strongly impacted by climate change and anthropogenic effects. Remotely sensed observations are commonly used for the monitoring of vegetation dynamics...
The CCI Soil Moisture dataset (CCI SM) is the most extensive climate data record of satellite soil moisture to date. To maximize its function as a climate benchmark, both long-term consistency and (model-) independence are high priorities. Two unique...
Despite the sparse distribution of meteorological stations and issues with missing data, vector-borne disease studies in Ethiopia have been commonly conducted based on the relationships between these diseases and ground-based in situ measurements of...
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Center for Satellite Applications and Research (STAR) facilitates and enables societal benefits from satellite oceanography, supporting operational and experimental satellite missions...
Understanding and forecasting hurricanes remains a challenge for the operational and research communities. To accurately predict the Tropical Cyclone (TC) evolution requires properly reflecting the storm’s inner core dynamics by using: (i) high-resol...
For more than a decade, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) has used in-situ observations of 2 m temperature and 2 m relative humidity to operationally constrain the temporal evolution of model soil moisture. These observat...
Snow depth on sea ice is a major constituent of the marine cryosphere. It is a key parameter for the derivation of sea-ice thickness from satellite altimetry. One way to retrieve the basin-scale snow depth on sea ice is by satellite microwave radiome...
Current methods for retrieving SWE (snow water equivalent) from space rely on passive microwave sensors. Observations are limited by poor spatial resolution, ambiguities related to separation of snow microstructural properties from the total snow mas...
Currently, the ability to use remotely sensed soil moisture to investigate linkages between the water and energy cycles and for use in data assimilation studies is limited to passive microwave data whose temporal revisit time is 2–3 days or act...
This paper introduces the Method of Microwave Rainfall Normalization (MMN) for the Global Satellite Mapping of Precipitation (GSMaP) algorithm in its latest version (V05, algorithm version 8), released in December 2021. The method aims to mitigate th...
Since 2009, three low frequency microwave sensors have been launched into space with the capability of global monitoring of sea surface salinity (SSS). The European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Microwave Imaging Radiometer using Aperture Synthe...
The impact of one or two missing passive microwave (PMW) input sensors on the end product of multi-satellite precipitation products is an interesting but obscure issue for both algorithm developers and data users. On 28 January 2013, the Version-7 TR...
Microwave-based remote sensing possesses the capability to penetrate through atmospheric obstructions such as cloud layers and fog, making it extensively utilized for estimating parameters including soil water content, atmospheric moisture levels, an...
The Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission with high-precision soil moisture (SM) retrieval products provides global daily composites of SM at 3, 9, and 36 km earth grids measured by L-band active and passive microwave sensors. The capability of...
The Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for the Global Precipitation Measurement mission (IMERG) has been widely evaluated. However, most of these studies focus on the ultimate merged satellite-gauge precipitation estimate and neglect the valuable...
We present a study on the potential of the Copernicus Imaging Microwave Radiometer (CIMR) mission for the global monitoring of Sea-Surface Salinity (SSS) using Level-4 (gap-free) analysis processing. Space-based SSS are currently provided by the Soil...
In the last decade, technological advances led to the launch of two satellite missions dedicated to measure the Earth’s surface soil moisture (SSM): the ESA’s Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) launched in 2009, and the NASA’s...
Over the last 25 years, the Arctic sea ice has seen its extent decline dramatically. Passive microwave observations, with their ability to penetrate clouds and their independency to sunlight, have been used to provide sea ice concentration (SIC) meas...
Accurate precipitation estimation remains a challenge, though it is fundamental for most hydrological analyses. In this regard, this study aims to achieve two objectives. Firstly, we evaluate the performance of two precipitation products from the Int...
The Federated Satellite System mission (FSSCat) was the winner of the 2017 Copernicus Masters Competition and the first Copernicus third-party mission based on CubeSats. One of FSSCat’s objectives is to provide coarse Soil Moisture (SM) estimations b...
Soil moisture products acquired from passive satellite missions have been widely applied in environmental processes. A primary challenge for the use of soil moisture products from passive sensors is their reliability. It is crucial to evaluate the re...
Sea surface temperatures (SSTs) derived from passive microwave (PMW) observations benefit global ocean and SST analyses because of their near-all-weather availability. Present PMW SSTs have a real aperture-limited spatial resolution in excess of 50 k...
Lack of frequent and global observations from space is currently a limiting factor in many Earth Observation (EO) missions. Two potential techniques that have been proposed nowadays are: (1) the use of satellite constellations, and (2) the use of Glo...
Soil moisture is an essential variable in Earth surface modeling. Two dedicated satellite missions, the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) and the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP), are currently in operation to map the global distribution of...
Across Eastern Africa, croplands cover 45 million ha. The regional economy is heavily dependent on small holder traditional rain-fed peasant agriculture (up to 90%), which is vulnerable to extreme weather events such as drought and floods that leads...
Water resources on Earth become one of the main concerns for society. Therefore, remote sensing methods are still under development in order to improve the picture of the global water cycle. In this context, the microwave bands are the most suitable...
Owing to its temporal resolution of 10-day and its polar orbit allowing several crossings over large lakes, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the French Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES) missions including Topex/...
Passive microwave remote sensing of soil moisture is crucial for monitoring the Earth’s water cycle and surface dynamics. The penetration depth during this process is significant, as it influences the accuracy of retrieved soil moisture data. W...
Long and consistent soil moisture time series at adequate spatial resolution are key to foster the application of soil moisture observations and remotely-sensed products in climate and numerical weather prediction models. The two L-band soil moisture...
The issue of Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) is a widespread problem in most microwave Earth observation missions, and passive instruments are particularly sensitive to RFI. This is the case for SMOS, Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity, a satellite...
High-precision time and frequency references are essential for satellite navigation, deep-space exploration, and space science missions. To address the large size, high power consumption, and limited integration of conventional Passive Hydrogen Maser...
Soil moisture is a factor for risk analysis in the agricultural sector, yet access to temporally and spatially detailed data is challenging for much of the world’s agricultural extend. Significant effort has been focused on developing methodolo...
The aim of this study is to highlight the issue of missed supercooled liquid water (SLW) detection in the current radar/lidar derived products and to investigate the potential of the combined use of the EarthCARE mission and the Arctic Weather Satell...
Coastal upwelling regions are one of the most dynamic areas of the world’s oceans. The California and Baja California Coasts are impacted by both coastal upwelling and the California Current, leading to frontal activity that is captured by grad...
Accurate estimation of soil moisture (SM) and vegetation optical depth (VOD) is essential for understanding land–atmosphere interactions, climate dynamics, and ecosystem processes. While passive microwave missions such as SMAP and SMOS provide...
Scatterometers are dedicated to monitoring sea surface wind vectors, but they also provide valuable data for polar applications. As a new type of scatterometer, the rotating fan beam scatterometer delivers a higher diversity of incidence angles and m...
Passive microwave remote sensing of soil moisture (SM) requires a physically based dielectric model that quantitatively converts the volumetric SM into the soil bulk dielectric constant. Mironov 2009 is the dielectric model used in the operational SM...
Soil moisture (SM) products derived from passive satellite missions are playing an increasingly important role in agricultural applications, especially crop monitoring and disaster warning. Evaluating the dependability of satellite-derived soil moist...
The European Space Agency (ESA) Climate Change Initiative (CCI) project combines multi-sensors at different microwave frequencies to derive three harmonized soil moisture products using active, passive and combined approaches. These long-term soil mo...
The Microwave Radiation Imager (MWRI) onboard the FengYun satellite plays a crucial role in global change monitoring and numerical weather prediction. Estimating and correcting geolocation errors are important to retrieving accurate geophysical varia...
Soil moisture (SM) is an important component of the Earth’s surface water balance and by extension the energy balance, regulating the land surface temperature (LST) and evapotranspiration (ET). Nowadays, there are two missions dedicated to monitoring...
NASA’s Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission only retrieved ~2.5 months of 3 km near surface soil moisture (NSSM) before its radar transmitter malfunctioned. NSSM remains an important area of study, and multiple applications would benefit...
Long-term climate records of soil moisture are of increased importance to climate researchers. In this study, we aim to evaluate the quality of three different fusion approaches that combine soil moisture retrieval from multiple satellite sensors. Th...
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