Validation Practices for Satellite Soil Moisture Retrievals: What Are (the) Errors?

Abstract

This paper presents a community effort to develop good practice guidelines for the validation of global coarse-scale satellite soil moisture products. We provide theoretical background, a review of state-of-the-art methodologies for estimating errors in soil moisture data sets, practical recommendations on data pre-processing and presentation of statistical results, and a recommended validation protocol that is supplemented with an example validation exercise focused on microwave-based surface soil moisture products. We conclude by identifying research gaps that should be addressed in the near future.

Publication
Remote Sensing of Environment
Jian Peng
Jian Peng
Professor for Hydrology and Remote Sensing / Head of Remote Sensing Department (UFZ)