Potential for High Resolution Systematic Global Surface Soil Moisture Retrieval via Change Detection Using Sentinel-1

• Published in: IEEE journal of selected topics in applied earth observations and remote sensing Vol. 5; no. 4; pp. 1303 - 1311
• Main Authors: Hornacek, Michael, Wagner, Wolfgang, Sabel, Daniel, Truong, Hong-Linh, Snoeij, Paul, Hahmann, Thomas, Diedrich, Erhard, Doubkova, Marcela
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 01.08.2012; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Backscatter; C-band; Environmental monitoring; Feasibility studies; near real time; Satellites; Sentinel-1; Soil measurements; Soil moisture; Soil surfaces; Soils; Spatial resolution; Surface soil; synthetic aperture radar; Canada; Europe
• ISSN: 1939-1404; 2151-1535
• DOI: 10.1109/JSTARS.2012.2190136

The forthcoming two-satellite GMES Sentinel-1 constellation is expected to render systematic surface soil moisture retrieval at 1 km resolution using C-band SAR data possible for the first time from space. Owing to the constellation's foreseen coverage over the Sentinel-1 Land Masses acquisition region-global approximately every six days, nearly daily over Europe and Canada depending on latitude-in the high spatial and radiometric resolution Interferometric Wide Swath (IW) mode, the Sentinel-1 mission shows high potential for global monitoring of surface soil moisture by means of fully automatic retrieval techniques. This paper presents the potential for providing such a service systematically over Land Masses and in near real time using a change detection approach, concluding that such a service is-subject to the mission operating as foreseen-expected to be technically feasible. The work presented in this paper was carried out as a feasibility study within the framework of the ESA-funded GMES Sentinel-1 Soil Moisture Algorithm Development (S1-SMAD) project.