ESTAR measurements during the Southern Great Plains experiment (SGP99)

During the Southern Great Plains experiment (SGP99), the electronically scanned thinned array radiometer (ESTAR) mapped L-band brightness temperature over a swath about 50-km wide and 300 km long, extending west from Oklahoma City, OK, to El Reno, OK, and north from the Little Washita River watershed to the Kansas border. ESTAR flew on the NASA P-3B Orion aircraft at an altitude of 7.6 km, and maps were made on seven days between July 8-20, 1999. The brightness temperature maps reflect the patterns of soil moisture expected from rainfall and are consistent with values of soil moisture observed at the research sites within the SGP99 study area and with previous measurements in this area. The data add to the resources for hydrologic modeling in this area and are further validation of the technology represented by ESTAR as a potential path to a future mission to map soil moisture globally from space.

[1]  Christopher S. Ruf,et al.  Aperture synthesis concepts in microwave remote sensing of the Earth , 1991 .

[2]  David M. Le Vine,et al.  Chapter 19 Sea surface salinity: Toward an operational remote-sensing system , 2000 .

[3]  D. M. Le Vine,et al.  Synthetic aperture radiometer systems , 1999, IMS 1999.

[4]  C. Swift,et al.  Initial Results In The Development Of A Synthetic Aperture Microwave Radiometer , 1990 .

[5]  Calvin T. Swift,et al.  A multifrequency microwave radiometer of the future , 1989 .

[6]  Thomas J. Jackson,et al.  Soil moisture and TRMM microwave imager relationships in the Southern Great Plains 1999 (SGP99) experiment , 2001, IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens..

[7]  A. Tanner,et al.  Aperture synthesis for passive microwave remote sensing: The electronically scanned thinned array radiometer , 1990 .

[8]  T. Schmugge,et al.  Results from the Push Broom Microwave Radiometer flights over the Konza Prairie in 1985 , 1988 .

[9]  F. R. Schiebe,et al.  Large area mapping of soil moisture using the ESTAR passive microwave radiometer , 1995 .

[10]  H. V. Gelder.  The Netherlands , 2004, Constitutions of Europe (2 vols.).

[11]  D.M. Le Vine,et al.  Passive microwave remote sensing with the synthetic aperture radiometer, ESTAR, during the Southern Great Plains experiment , 1998, IGARSS '98. Sensing and Managing the Environment. 1998 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing. Symposium Proceedings. (Cat. No.98CH36174).

[12]  Thomas J. Jackson,et al.  Soil moisture mapping at regional scales using microwave radiometry: the Southern Great Plains Hydrology Experiment , 1999, IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens..

[13]  T. Jackson,et al.  ESTAR: a synthetic aperture microwave radiometer for remote sensing applications , 1994, Proc. IEEE.

[14]  Thomas J. Jackson,et al.  Passive microwave remote sensing of soil moisture: results from HAPEX, FIFE and MONSOON 90 , 1992 .

[15]  Calvin T. Swift,et al.  Considerations for Microwave Remote Sensing of Ocean-Surface Salinity , 1983, IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing.

[16]  Simon Yueh,et al.  A large-antenna microwave radiometer-scatterometer concept for ocean salinity and soil moisture sensing , 2000, IEEE Trans. Geosci. Remote. Sens..

[17]  T. Jackson,et al.  Mapping surface soil moisture using an aircraft-based passive microwave instrument: algorithm and example , 1996 .