Soil moisture and vegetation observations during SGP99 using the PALS airborne microwave radiometer-radar system

The Passive/Active L/S-band (PALS) airborne microwave sensor was flown for the first time during the 1999 Southern Great Plains (SGP99) experiment. The objective was to acquire a dataset for studying a combined radiometer-radar multifrequency, multipolarization approach to soil moisture sensing under varied terrain conditions. Six days of PALS flight data were acquired over the Little Washita and El Reno areas in Oklahoma, in conjunction with ground-based soil and vegetation in-situ sampling. The data illustrate the different sensitivities of the PALS channels to soil moisture, temperature, surface roughness, and vegetation cover, and will provide a basis for development of passive and active multichannel algorithms for soil moisture sensing