Summary

Description

Notice to Data Users: The documentation for this data set was provided solely by the Principal Investigator(s) and was not further developed, thoroughly reviewed, or edited by NSIDC. Thus, support for this data set may be limited. This data set consists of Vegetation Water Content (VWC) data for two Soil Moisture Experiment 2003 (SMEX03) regional study areas, Oklahoma North and Oklahoma South. VWC was derived from the Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) which was obtained from Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper (TM) and Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper (ETM+) imagery. Though Landsat satellite data were acquired for multiple dates, data acquired on 10 July 2003 were selected as providing ideal conditions for the estimation of VWC. Data are provided as flat binary files and are available via FTP. Individual data values must be divided by 32 to obtain the actual vegetation water content in kg/m2. These data were collected as part of a validation study for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer - Earth Observing System (AMSR-E). AMSR-E is a mission instrument launched aboard NASA's Aqua Satellite on 04 May 2002. AMSR-E validation studies linked to SMEX are designed to evaluate the accuracy of AMSR-E soil moisture data. Specific validation objectives include assessing and refining soil moisture algorithm performance; verifying soil moisture estimation accuracy; investigating the effects of vegetation, surface temperature, topography, and soil texture on soil moisture accuracy; and determining the regions that are useful for AMSR-E soil moisture measurements.