HR: 11:05h
AN: H21H-04    [PDF]
TI: Soil moisture and evapotranspiration patterns from space: remote sensing techniques to determine large scale water balances
AU: * McCabe, M F
EM: mmccabe@princeton.edu
AU: Wood, E F
EM: efwood@princeton.edu
AU: Su, H
EM: hongbosu@princeton.edu
AU: Gao, H
EM: huiling@princeton.edu
AU: Sheffield, J
EM: justin@princeton.edu
AB: The estimation of state variables such as the soil moisture and surface temperature has been a key research area for many years. The importance of this information for land surface studies has motivated the development of different estimation techniques for these variables. Increasingly, there exists the capacity to independently determine components of the hydrological cycle from remote sensing data. Developing techniques to effectively combine the multiple streams of information required for a water budget assessment provides a difficult challenge, particularly given the disparities in spatial and temporal scales between measurements and predictions. The launched EOS Terra and Aqua platforms contain sensors that have an improved capability to retrieve these variables. Coupling these measurements with measurements from TRMM-TMI and GOES satellite platforms with large scale meteorological forcing data available as part of the Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS), offers an increased opportunity to examine global and continental scale hydrological patterns. This presentation reports on recent efforts to measure components of the water budget through remote sensing. The presentation will focus on the estimation of soil moisture and evapotranspiration over the southern Great Plains region of the United States for spring and summer 2002. The retrieved values are compared with available validation data and qualitatively examined against each other to assess their association. A number of potential data assimilation approaches that could be employed to incorporate such information into a robust water balance framework are discussed.
DE: 1818 Evapotranspiration
DE: 1836 Hydrologic budget (1655)
DE: 1866 Soil moisture
DE: 1878 Water/energy interactions
SC: Hydrology [H]
MN: 2003 Fall Meeting