H SAF Soil Moisture products, Quality Assessment and case studies
Overview on the H SAF satellite derived soil moisture products.
The EUMETSAT Satellite Application Facility on Support to Operational Hydrology and Water Management (H SAF) develops and provides operational satellite products for precipitation, snow and soil moisture. These satellite products have a wide range of applications, but especially play a key role in numerical weather prediction.
The H SAF soil moisture product suite is composed of surface and root zone soil moisture products available at various spatial resolution, ranging from 1 km to 50 km. Surface Soil Moisture (SSM) products are based on backscatter observations provided by the Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT) onboard the series of Metop satellites using the EUMETSAT H SAF TU Wien soil moisture retrieval algorithm, whereas Root Zone Soil Moisture (RZSM) products assimilate H SAF SSM products within the ECMWF/H SAF land data assimilation system. At the moment, two ASCAT instruments are currently operational on-board Metop-B and Metop-C.