The National Aeronautics and Space Administration Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission has been validating its soil moisture (SM) products since the start of data production on March 31, 2015. Prior to launch, the mission defined a set of criteria for core validation sites (CVS) that enable the testing of the key mission SM accuracy requirement (unbiased root-mean-square error <0.04 m ³ /m ³ ). The validation approach also includes other (“sparse network”) in situ SM measurements, satellite SM products, model-based SM products, and field experiments. Over the past six years, the SMAP SM products have been analyzed with respect to these reference data, and the analysis approaches themselves have been scrutinized in an effort to best understand the products’ performance. Validation of the most recent SMAP Level 2 and 3 SM retrieval products (R17000) shows that the L -band (1.4 GHz) radiometer-based SM record continues to meet mission requirements. The products are generally consistent with SM retrievals from the European Space Agency Soil Moisture Ocean Salinity mission, although there are differences in some regions. The high-resolution (3-km) SM retrieval product, generated by combining Copernicus Sentinel-1 data with SMAP observations, performs within expectations. Currently, however, there is limited availability of 3-km CVS data to support extensive validation at this spatial scale. The most recent (version 5) SMAP Level 4 SM data assimilation product providing surface and root-zone SM with complete spatio–temporal coverage at 9-km resolution also meets performance requirements. The SMAP SM validation program will continue throughout the mission life; future plans include expanding it to forested and high-latitude regions.

Core Ideas: Upscaling methods compared in situ measures with soil moisture from the SMAP satellite. The accuracy of SMAP soil moisture products in annual cropland was assessed. The spatial representativeness of sparse in situ networks was determined. In 2015, NASA launched the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite. Data from this satellite are being exploited to improve forecasting of extreme weather events and delivery of disaster response. International core validation sites (CVSs) have been contributing in situ soil moisture data to validate and calibrate SMAP soil moisture products. Overall the soil moisture retrieval errors have exceeded SMAP's mission requirement (errors below 0.04 m ³ m ⁻³ ), with the exception of some sites of annual cropland as present at the Carman (Canada) CVS. In 2016, a SMAP validation experiment was conducted at the Canadian site in Manitoba (SMAPVEX16‐MB) in an attempt to understand the differences between the SMAP soil moisture retrievals and the permanent in situ network observations. The research presented here analyzed the performance of this network in representing soil moisture within a SMAP pixel and tested five upscaling approaches. Comparisons between the permanent network and SMAPVEX16‐MB measurements (from temporary stations and field measures) confirmed agreement among these three sources of soil moisture measures. The SMAP soil moisture values were compared with in situ soil moisture upscaled from the four tested approaches as well as soil moisture estimated by the NOAH Land Surface Model (LSM). There were similar discrepancies when analyzing all methods (RMSE 0.072–0.074 m ³ m ⁻³ for the four upscaling methods; 0.076 m ³ m ⁻³ for the LSM approach), yielding no reduction in the soil moisture RMSE for this site. The SMAP team will continue to investigate other factors that may be contributing to errors above 0.04 m ³ m ⁻³ at these annually cropped CVSs.

Crop growth monitoring using compact-pol synthetic aperture radar (CP-SAR) data is gaining attention with the rapid advancements toward operational applications. In this article, we propose a vegetation index for compact polarimetric (CP) SAR data [compact-pol radar vegetation index (CpRVI)]. The CpRVI is derived using the concept of a geodesic distance between the Kennaugh matrices projected on a unit sphere. This distance is utilized to compute a similarity measure between the observed Kennaugh matrix and the Kennaugh matrix of an ideal depolarizer (a realization of vegetation canopy). The similarity measure is then modulated with a scaled quantity derived from the scattering power ratio of the same and opposite sense polarization with respect to the transmitted circular polarization. In this article, we utilize time-series-simulated RADARSAT Constellation Mission (RCM) compact-pol SAR data (RH-RV) obtained from the full-pol RADARSAT-2 observations during the soil moisture active passive (SMAP) validation experiment 2016 (SMAPVEX16-MB) campaign in Manitoba, Canada, to assess the proposed vegetation index. Among the various crops grown in this region, in particular, we analyze the growth stages of wheat and soybean due to their different canopy structures. A temporal analysis of the proposed CpRVI with crop biophysical parameters [the plant area index (PAI) and vegetation water content (VWC)] at different phenological stages confirms the trend of CpRVI with the plant growth. Nevertheless, variations of CpRVI values are apparent with different plant densities for both the crop types. Also, the linear regression analysis confirms that the CpRVI values significantly correlate with PAI (r = 0.72 and 0.85) and VWC (r = 0.62 and 0.75) for both wheat and soybean. We observed good retrieval of PAI and VWC for both wheat and soybean.

This paper presents an assessment of the applicability of using RADARSAT-2-derived soil moisture data in the Hydrologic Modelling System developed by the Hydrologic Engineering Center (HEC-HMS) for flood forecasting with a case study in the Sturgeon Creek watershed in Manitoba, Canada. Spring flooding in Manitoba is generally influenced by both winter precipitation and soil moisture conditions in the fall of the previous year. As a result, the soil moisture accounting (SMA) and the temperature index algorithms are employed in the simulation. Results from event and continuous simulations of HEC-HMS show that the model is suitable for flood forecasting in Manitoba. Soil moisture data from the Manitoba Agriculture field survey and RADARSAT-2 satellite were used to set the initial soil moisture for the event simulations. The results confirm the benefit of using satellite data in capturing peak flows in a snowmelt event. A sensitivity analysis of SMA parameters, such as soil storage, maximum infiltration, soil percolation, maximum canopy storage and tension storage, was performed and ranked to determine which parameters have a significant impact on the performance of the model. The results show that the soil moisture storage was the most sensitive parameter. The sensitivity analysis of initial soil moisture in a snowmelt event shows that cumulative flow and peak flow are highly influenced by the initial soil moisture setting of the model. Therefore, there is a potential to utilize RADARSAT-2-derived soil moisture for hydrological modelling in other snow-dominated Manitoba watersheds.

In this letter, we propose a novel vegetation index from polarimetric synthetic-aperture radar (PolSAR) data using the generalized volume scattering model. The geodesic distance between two Kennaugh matrices projected on a unit sphere proposed by Ratha et al. is used in this letter. This distance is utilized to compute a similarity measure between the observed Kennaugh matrix and generalized volume scattering models. A factor is estimated corresponding to the ratio of the minimum to the maximum geodesic distances between the observed Kennaugh matrix and the set of elementary targets: trihedral, cylinder, dihedral, and narrow dihedral. This factor is then scaled and multiplied with the similarity measure to obtain the novel vegetation index. The proposed vegetation index is compared with the radar vegetation index (RVI) proposed by Kim and van Zyl. A time series of RADARSAT-2 data acquired during the Soil Moisture Active Passive Validation Experiment 2016 (SMAPVEX16-MB) campaign in Manitoba, Canada, is used to assessing the proposed RVI.

Few countries are using space-based Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) to operationally produce national-scale maps of their agricultural landscapes. For the past ten years, Canada has integrated C-band SAR with optical satellite data to map what crops are grown in every field, for the entire country. While the advantages of SAR are well understood, the barriers to its operational use include the lack of familiarity with SAR data by agricultural end-user agencies and the lack of a ‘blueprint’ on how to implement an operational SAR-based mapping system. This research reviewed order of operations for SAR data processing and how order choice affects processing time and classification outcomes. Additionally this research assessed the impact of speckle filtering by testing three filter types (adaptive, multi-temporal and multi-resolution) at varying window sizes for three study sites with different average field sizes. The Touzi multi-resolution filter achieved the highest overall classification accuracies for all three sites with varying window sizes, and with only a small (< 2%) difference in accuracy relative to the Gamma Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) adaptive filter which had similar window sizes across sites. As such, the assessment of order of operations for noise reduction and terrain correction was completed using the Gamma MAP adaptive filter. This research found there was no difference in classification accuracies regardless of whether noise reduction was applied before or after terrain correction. However, implementing the terrain correction as the first operation resulted in a 10 to 50% increase in processing time. This is an important consideration when designing and delivering operational systems, especially for large geographies like Canada where hundreds of SAR images are required. These findings will encourage country-wide, regional and global food monitoring initiatives to consider SAR sensors as an important source of data to operationally map agricultural production.