Objectives

To pave the way for the utilisation of satellite derived soil moisture products in Romania, by creating the framework for the validation and evaluation of actual & future satellite microwave soil moisture derived products, demonstrating its value, and by developing the necessary expertise for successfuly approaching implementations in the Societal Benefit Areas (as they were defined in GEOSS).

Tehnical objectives:

  • Collect, analyse and compile the user requirements for validated SSM products;
  • Design, implement and operate the Continous Soil Moisture & Temperature Ground-based Observation Network (RSMN) for the validation of soil moisture products derived from current in-orbit and future microwave instruments;
  • Define a validation scheme of ASCAT/SMOS/Sentinel-1 soil moisture products for the analyse and qualification of the RSMN implementation;
  • Design, implement and test a validation module and processing chain for the experimental validation of ASCAT/SMOS/Sentinel-1 soil moisture products;
  • Evaluate the performance of satellite moisture products from ASCAT/SMOS/Sentinel-1compared with in-situ data from RSMN and the national agro-meteorological network;
  • Identify the SBA’s subcategories which would most gain from satellite soil moisture products, based on user requirements and results of the validation experiments;
  • Prepare for the validation and utilisation of Sentinel-1 soil moisture products;
  • Contribute to the International Soil Moisture Network (ISMN) and participate in international cal/val activities.

ASSIMO will remove the roadblok imposed by the missing continuous in-situ observations needed for the validation and evaluation of soil moisture products, opening the way to the utilization of SSM retrieved products in high economic impact domains like hydrology, water management, agriculture, flood forecasting, drought monitoring – to name just a few.

Original, novelty and innovative nature of the project:

  • ASSIMO is the first Romanian attempt to tackle satellite soil moisture products validation over its national territory;
  • ASSIMO proposed assessment of currently available satellite soil moisture products over the national territory;
  • RSMN will be the first Romanian ground-based observation network dedicated to the validation of satellite moisture retrievals;
  • RSMN will be the first operational soil moisture network in South-Eastern Europe;
  • RSMN will introduce a new concept – “distributed network” in NMA observation network as opposed to the centralised structure of the actual architecture.
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