2012 AGU Chapman Conference on Remote Sensing of the ...

a few planned sites. They included Table Mountain(Colorado, USA) and Mase flux site (Ibaraki, Japan) amongothers which encompass a wide variety of vegetative coverand topographic variation. For determining the relativehomogeneity of the candidate sites, we evaluated scalingdependency in the area surrounding the viewing footprint ofeach tower radiometer. High resolution Landsat images ofthe research sites were used to simulate NDVI and EVI valuesat several different satellite footprints via spatialaggregation. These simulated coarse resolution VIs werecompared against the tower-footprint VIs and differencesand variation in these measurements assessed. In general,mean NDVI and EVI values varied with footprint size, butthey matched with the tower-footprint values with 95%confidence level over a growing season. The developedprotocol was not only useful for evaluating siterepresentativeness, but also for understanding a bias due tosite heterogeneity. High resolution imagery should beincorporated into the tower reflectance-based validation forheterogeneous sites.Cooper, StevenOn the limitations of satellite passive remotesensing for climate process studiesCooper, Steven 1 ; Mace, Gerald 1 ; Lebsock, Matthew 2 ;Johnston, Marston 3, 41. Atmospheric Sciences, University of Utah, Salt Lake City,UT, USA2. JPL, Pasadena, CA, USA3. Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute,Norrkoping, Sweden4. Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, SwedenGiven the uncertain future of next generation satellitemissions such as ACE and the possibility that space-basedactive sensors such as radar or lidar may be unavailable inthe relatively near future, we examine the ability of passivemeasurements (visible, near-infrared, infrared, microwave) todiscriminate critical atmospheric processes necessary for theunderstanding of climate. In this work, we exploit anunderstanding of both vertical sensitivities and retrievaluncertainties associated with these passive measurements todetermine their ability to uniquely differentiate between keycloud and precipitation property states. We perform such ananalysis for each ice clouds, low-latitude shallow marineclouds, and high-latitude mixed-phase clouds scenarios. 1)We first examine our ability to define the partitioning ofcloud ice mass between ‘suspended’ and ‘precipitating’particle modes and examine these results in context of cloudice representation in the European EC-Earth climate model.2) We then examine our ability to define the vertical profileof the partitioning of rain and cloud water properties in lowlatitudeshallow marine clouds, which are believed to play amajor role in potential climate cloud feedbacks. 3) Finally,we examine our ability to determine the vertical profiles ofhigh-latitude mixed phase cloud properties, which play a keyrole in high-latitude feedbacks. For these vertically definedcloud scenarios, we find that we cannot confidentlydiscriminate between key cloud and precipitation states (e.g.how big are the ice particles? is it drizzling?) due to theinherent non-uniqueness of the passive retrieval approach.Although we do not deny the important contribution ofpassive remote sensing techniques to our currentunderstanding of climate, our findings suggest the need forthe continued employment and advancement of space-borneactive measurements (used in co-incidence with passivemeasurements) as we work towards an improvedunderstanding of climate.Cosh, Michael H.Validating the BERMS in Situ Soil MoistureNetwork with a Large Scale Temporary NetworkCosh, Michael H. 1 ; Jackson, Thomas J. 1 ; Smith, Craig 2 ; Toth,Brenda 31. U. S. Dept. of Agriculture, Beltsville, MD, USA2. Climate Research Division, Science and TechnologyBranch, Environment Canada, Saskatoon, SK, Canada3. Hydrometeorological and Arctic Lab, EnvironmentCanada, Saskatoon, SK, CanadaCalibration and validation of soil moisture satelliteproducts requires data records of large spatial and temporalextent, but obtaining this data can be challenging. Thesechallenges can include remote locations, and expense ofequipment. One location with a long record of soil moisturedata is the Boreal Ecosystem Research and Monitoring Sites(BERMS) in Saskatchewan Canada. In and around theBERMS study area, there are five long term soil moistureprofile stations. These stations provide a critical butincomplete view of the soil moisture patterns across thedomain of study of 10, 000 square kilometers. Incoordination with the Canadian Experiment-Soil Moisture2010 (CANEX-SM10), a temporary network of surface soilmoisture sensors was installed during the summer of 2010to enhance the data resources of the BERMS network.During the 3-month deployment, 20 stations recordedsurface information for use in validating the network andthe recently launched Soil Moisture Ocean Salinity (SMOS)Satellite. Using temporal stability analysis, this network wasable to scale the BERMS network to a satellite scale footprintwhich can be extrapolated beyond the time period of theinstallation. The accuracy of the network as compared togravimetric sampling is evaluated during the summermonths also.49