Australian Airborne Cal/Val Experiment for SMOS1st Field Experiment currently under wayA very warm ‘G’day mate’ from Australia!The first Australian Airborne Cal/Val Experiment for SMOS (AACES) is under way since 18 January 2010 in the Murrumbidgee catchment in southern New South Wales, Australia. Given the recent launch of SMOS, AACES represents the first extensive and probably most comprehensive of such experiments undertaken during the commissioning and later operational phase of SMOS. The project is led by Jeff Walker and Chris Rudiger from the University of Melbourne and supported by the invaluable help of their PhD students. Moreover, thanks to the generosity of various research institutes from France, Germany, Denmark, Poland, and the Netherlands in addition to the flights covered by ESA, a total of 14 people have joined this campaign to boost the manpower of the sampling teams.The Murrumbidgee catchment is unique as it comprises a distinct variety of topographic, climatic and land cover characteristics, and therefore represents an excellent validation site for the land component of this satellite mission. A total of 10 patches of 100km x 50km (aligned with the synthetic SMOS grid, and therefore including two independent SMOS footprints) are covered by an aircraft carrying an L-band radiometer (www.plmr.unimelb.edu.au) and VIS/NIR/SWIR/TIR sensors. With a flight altitude, the ground pixel resolution is 1km, resulting in an almost complete coverage of the catchment (50,000 of 70,000km2). The aircraft flights are aligned with SMOS morning overpasses. At the same time, two ground teams are covering an area of 5km x 2km each, collecting soil moisture (50m spacing along the 5km transects), soil temperature, and soil salinity. A sub-group of each team is meanwhile collecting LAI, dew, destructive vegetation samples, and hypersepctral measurements of the surface conditions.So far, eight patches have been covered (see below for some examples of the aircraft data). We started off in the west of the catchment, near the twon of Balranald, with temperatures around 46C at 2pm (measured in the shade, if there were any…..) and soil moisture conditions, in which 8% was considered an exceptional spike. Though, we have also just spent a week-end observing a rainfall event of 100mm over two days in the area of the Australian capital of Canberra, which, in a region that usually has 600mm as an annual average, is a fairly good quantity. Creeks that haven’t seen any water since 1998 have overflown, big trees have been uprooted…. We sampled today and values easily reached 40% soil moisture. The aircraft data promises quite some contrasting responses in the SMOS observation. We are certainly looking forward to those data.The earnest post-processing of all the data will begin, when we will be back in Melbourne in 10 days time. If interested you can contact Jeff (j.walker@unimelb.edu.au) or Chris (crudiger@unimelb.edu.au) directly for more information. I will try to put some more infos on this blog in the next few days…..Until then.Cheers, mates.ChrisPost scriptum: Despite the fact that Australia habours the most deadly snakes, spiders, jellyfish, krokodiles, sharks, and a few less mortal but not less vicious animals, in addition to an environment in which drinking 6l of water still means that you are thirsty, no participant has been harmed so far…. đ
