A Five-Year Validation of AMSR-E Soil Moisture Products

Validation is an important and particularly challenging task for passive microwave remote sensing of soil moisture from Earth orbit. As part of the Advance Microwave Scanning Radiometer-E (AMSR-E) validation programs networks of dedicated validation sites were developed. Measurements have been made on a continuous basis since 2002. The NASA and JAXA standard soil moisture products were compared to the network observations, along with an alternative single channel algorithm. The results indicate that each algorithm has different performance statistics that depend upon the site. Results clearly show that there is much room for improvement in the algorithms adopted by JAXA and NASA. They also illustrate the potential pitfalls in using the products without caution.