Ground Measurements Confirm First SMOS Results

The European Space Agency's (ESA) advanced Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite was only launched in November 2009, but it's already providing its operators with its first results. In order to ensure that these are the most accurate observations possible, teams on the ground are currently checking every bit of data against records collected from the observed site. The spacecraft is still in its commissioning phase, and so some tweaking might be needed before other observations are conducted.

It is the goal of these new digs to ensure which of the two needs to be done. The first of many validation campaigns, as they are called by ESA officials, has already been conducted in Australia, and the results are in. The reason why this particular continent was chosen was because it is currently experiencing the summer growing season. Additionally, the ruggedness of the terrain would provide more obstacles for SMOS, and thus the researchers would know what the satellite is made of. According to the people who conducted the AACES (Australian Airborne Calibration/Validation Experiments for SMOS) field campaign, the effort was a resounding success.

What SMOS essentially does is create “brightness temperatures” of the ground, assessing the radiation that our planet's surface reflects back to space. It is located on an orbit about 760 kilometers away from Earth, and this apparently provides it with an amazing vantage point. By using its sensitive instruments, the craft may be able to boost our understanding of the planet's water cycle, experts say. Soil moisture maps could be correlated with datasets of the world's oceans' salinity, and thus produce an amazingly-detailed model of how the planet is moving its water around.

“The campaign has been a huge success. A significant rainfall event that occurred in the middle of the campaign means that both extreme hot dry and cool wet conditions have been captured by this extensive validation dataset. The validation campaign will serve a key role in benchmarking the performance of SMOS during its six-month commissioning phase,” says University of Melbourne expert, professor Jeff Walker, who was a part of the ground effort.