Assessment of soil moisture derived from radar satellite data in the Arctic for the purpose of permafrost studies ...

• Main Author: Högström, Elin
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: TU Wien 2023
• Subjects: microwave remote sensing; hydrology; Arctic; permafrost; Tundra
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.34726/hss.2023.28127; https://repositum.tuwien.at/handle/20.500.12708/177309

The Arctic tundra lowlands are to a large extent underlain by permafrost, which counts as an essential climate variable. Observations show a nearly four-fold faster warming here than the rest of the world during the last decades. The remote nature of the Arctic means that collected ground data are scarce, which is why availability and applicability of satellite data are crucial here.Soil moisture data from the active layer are of high demand for permafrost applications, such as modeling and flux up-scaling studies. Data from the C-band active microwave remote sensing instrument Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT) provides an operational global coarse scale (25 km) surface soil moisture (SSM) product in near real time since 2008. However, there are challenges to the radar retrieval, related to the specific character of the Arctic, such as frozen ground conditions, landscape heterogeneity and seasonal variations. Here, such typically expected influences were examined for C-band backscatter derived SSM. Comparisons ...