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 SMEX04 soil characteristics data set contains data for Sonora, Mexico as part of the 2004 Soil Moisture Experiment (SMEX04). The data were extracted from the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) digital soil map of the world. Parameters for this data set are soil texture in terms of percent sand and percent clay, and porosity. The temporal coverage is approximate, as these data are representative of the conditions present in the regional study area during the general timeline of the creation of the 2000 FAO soil map of the world. The total volume of this data set is approximately 110 kilobytes. Data are provided in an ASCII text file and are available via FTP. The Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer - Earth Observing System (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.