Abstract:
Soil moisture retrievals from satellites contain errors because the physical processes that relate brightness temperature to soil moisture are difficult to parameterize, and because global distributions of the retrieval algorithm's parameters are difficult to obtain. For the design of new satellite sensors, it is critical to understand just how uncertain satellite retrievals can be and still be useful. In this project, we aim to determine the contribution of satellite retrievals to land moisture data assimilation products as a function of retrieval error.