Abstract:
In this talk, we present the results of a recently published milestone publication for the validation of global coarse-scale satellite soil moisture products (doi:10.1016/j.rse.2020.111806). It is a community effort in which validation good practice guidelineshave been developed. 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. The presented guidelines are endorsed by the Land Product Validation Subgroup of the Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (https://lpvs.gsfc.nasa.gov) and aim to serve as exemplary work for the development of similar best practice guidelines in other communities.