Surface soil moisture estimation using active microwave ERS wind scatterometer and SAR data

This paper presents an original methodology to retrieve surface (< 5 cm) soil moisture over low vegetated regions using the two active microwave instruments of ERS satellite. The developed algorithm takes advantage of the multi-angular configuration and high temporal resolution of the Wind Scatterometer (WSC) combined with the SAR high spatial resolution. High correlations (R/sup 2/ greater than 0.8) are observed for three studied watersheds in France with an rms error smaller than 4% between real and retrieved moistures.