Presentation

Theia Surface Soil Moisture SEC brings together teams from Cesbio, UMR Ispa, IGE and ECMWF who are developing a series of products for estimating soil surface humidity, accompanied by indicators (drought, flooding, rain estimator) throughout the world, at a frequency of twice every 3 days.

This product is of interest to the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), the American Oceanic and Atmospheric Observation Agency (NOAA), the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and research laboratories.

From the angular values of the gloss temperature at 1.4 GHZ, an estimation of the surface moisture of the soils is made using SMOS data (and eventually also with SMAP). The product is accompanied by quality indicators (DQX, GQX and Chi2) and is only estimated when the ground is neither frozen nor covered with snow. An RFI (Radio Frequency Identification) flag is also available.

Based on this measurement by assimilation in a 3-layer model, the CES proposes:

• a product for measuring Soil Moisture in the Root Zone
• a product for measuring Soil Moisture at 25 km resolution. A simplified version (SMOS-IC) has been developed for 2010-2018.
• a Drought Index
• a Surface Roughness indicator

The soil moisture product has been operational since 2010 and is available at CATDS (SMOS upstream data treatment centre). The humidity products in the root zone and the dryness indicator are also available at CATDS. A real-time product has been available on the GTS and Eumetcast since 2015. 

Contact

Yann Kerr
Cesbio
@Y.Kerr

Jean-Pierre Wigneron
INRAE | SMOS-IC
ResearchGate
Contributions FR | EN

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