| Summary: | Regional soil moisture monitoring from satellite platforms can inform our understanding of climate change in the Canadian Arctic. These sensors require ground-based validation to ensure product accuracy, which can be achieved by upscaling cosmic-ray probe derived soil moisture measurements from an intermediate footprint. Calibration of the cosmic-ray probe installed at Trail Valley Creek, NWT was performed and resulted in an accuracy of 0.019 m3 m-3 RMSE. In addition, a preliminary validation of the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) soil moisture product was performed. Results indicate a SMAP dry bias at this study site (>0.09 m3 m-3 RMSE). A forward model was employed to determine if SMAP’s bias is a projection or algorithm issue, and results indicate a moderate correlation between SMAP brightness temperature and in situ network brightness temperature (r = 0.44). This demonstrates the potential accuracy improvement made by projecting SMAP soil moisture data on a polar grid in northern latitudes.
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