Soil Moisture Experiments in 2003

The NASA Aqua and Japanese ADEOS-II Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer Programs are committed to developing and providing daily soil moisture products. This is the first time that this challenging task has ever been attempted.

The wide range of vegetation conditions that have to be dealt with, due to the global coverage and multi-temporal observations, exceed those that have been evaluated in previous investigations.

For these reasons, validation is critical to the AMSR soil moisture product development and acceptance.

SMEX03 will provide validation data for a wide range of vegetation conditions ranging from well understood grass and wheat in Oklahoma to new observations of the Amazon rainforests. In addition it will provide a test bed for other new satellite instruments such as the Envisat ASAR and aircraft based prototype satellite instruments.

SMEX03 will be conducted at U.S. sites in Oklahoma, Georgia and Alabama in June and July and Brazil in December.

Experiment Plan
(Updated May 27, 2003)

Photo Gallery

Aircraft Missions

SMEX03 Data will be available at NSIDC.