Continental-Scale Evaluation of Remotely Sensed Soil Moisture Products

A new data assimilation-based approach for the continental-scale evaluation of remotely sensed surface soil moisture retrievals is applied to four separate soil moisture products over the contiguous U.S. The approach is based on quantifying the ability of a given soil moisture product to correct for known rainfall errors when sequentially assimilated into a simple water balance model. Analysis results provide new insight into the continental-scale performance of surface soil moisture retrieval algorithms based on satellite passive microwave, scatterometer, and thermal remote sensing observations.