The medium resolution soil moisture dataset: Overview of the SHARE ESA DUE TIGER project

To address the needs of the hydrological community for medium resolution soil moisture dataset an approach developed at the TU WIEN for the coarse resolution ERS/METOP datasets has been transferred to medium resolution SAR data. This work was performed within the ESA Tiger Innovator project SHARE and introduces an operational soil moisture monitoring service for the region of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and Australia. The data from the ASAR onboard ENVISAT operating in Global Mode (GM) with 1 km spatial resolution were implemented for the dataset generation that provides twice weekly measurements and captures highly variable soil moisture patterns. Several validation and application studies were summarized in this paper that demonstrated the ability of ASAR Global Mode (GM) Soil Moisture for global soil moisture monitoring. The dataset can be accessed via http://www.ipf.tuwien.ac.at/radar/share/.