Freeman, A., M. Moghaddam, Y. Lou, W. Crow, R. Cuenca, D. Entekhabi, S. Hensley, D. Hollinger, R. H. Reichle, S. Saatchi, P. Shepson, and S. Wofsy:
"The EV-1 Airborne Microwave Observatory of Subcanopy and Subsurface (AirMOSS) Investigation"
Presentation at the AGU Chapman Conference on Remote Sensing of the Terrestrial Water Cycle, Kona, HI, USA, 2012.

Abstract:
AirMOSS is one of the five Earth Venture-1 investigations selected in May 2010, with the goal of improving the estimates of the North American net ecosystem exchange (NEE) through high-resolution observations of root zone soil moisture (RZSM). The 5-year AirMOSS investigation is deigned to overlap with the SMAP mission and will address the following science questions:

1. Quantitatively, what are the local-, regional-, and continental-scale heterogeneities of RZSM in North America?

2. Quantitatively, how does RZSM control ecosystem carbon fluxes at each of these scales?

3. By how much will the estimates of North American NEE improve with the accurate knowledge of both the mean and the variance of RZSM?

To obtain estimates of RZSM and assess its heterogeneities, AirMOSS will fly a newly developed NASA P-band (430 MHz) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) over 2500 km2 areas within nine major biomes of north America, from 2012 to 2014. The flights will cover areas containing flux tower sites in regions from the boreal forests in central Canada to the tropical forests in Costa Rica. The radar snapshots will be used to generate 100-m resolution estimates of RZSM via inversion of scattering models of vegetated surfaces. These retrievals will in turn be assimilated or otherwise used to estimate land model hydrological parameters over the nine biomes, generating a fine-grained time record of soil moisture evolution in the root zone, and integrated with an ecosystem demography model to predict component carbon fluxes. The sensitivity of carbon flux components to RZSM uncertainties and heterogeneity will be quantified. In-situ soil moisture and atmospheric carbon measurements are planned for validation of the AirMOSS product suite.

The AirMOSS radar is currently under construction at JPL, with first science flights expected in June 2012. In-situ soil sensing profiles are currently being deployed at the AirMOSS sites, and test flights for atmospheric carbon measurements are also planned in the next several months. The entire data processing chain, including SAR data processing, radar RZSM retrievals, land surface hydrology modeling, and ecosystem demography modeling are being implemented and tested prior to the first science flights. This paper will provide an overview of the investigation, campaign design, and development status.

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NASA-GSFC / GMAO / Rolf Reichle