%0 Journal Article
%A Yingying Chen
%A Kun Yang
%A Jun Qin
%A Qian Cui
%A Hui Lu
%A Zhu La
%A Menglei Han
%A Wenjun Tang
%+ Key Laboratory of Tibetan Environment Changes and Land Surface Processes, Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing China ;; Ministry of Education Key Laboratory for Earth System Modeling and Center for Earth System Science Tsinghua University Beijing China ;; CAS Center for Excellence in Tibetan Plateau Earth Sciences Beijing China ;; National Space Science Center Chinese Academy of Sciences Beijing China ;; College of Earth Sciences University of Chinese Academy of Science Beijing China
%T Evaluation of SMAP, SMOS, and AMSR2 soil moisture retrievals against observations from two networks on the Tibetan Plateau
%J Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres
%D 2017
%N 11
%V 122
%K satellite soil moisture products;soil moisture networks;Tibetan Plateau;evaluation
%X Two soil moisture and temperature monitoring networks were established in the Tibetan Plateau (TP) during recent years. One is located in a semihumid area (Naqu) of central TP and consists of 56 soil moisture and temperature measurement (SMTM) stations, the other is located in a semiarid area (Pali) of southern TP and consists of 21 SMTM stations. In this study, the station data are used to evaluate soil moisture retrievals from three microwave satellites, i.e., the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) of NASA, the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) of European Space Agency, and the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2) of Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. It is found that the SMAP retrievals tend to underestimate soil moisture in the two TP networks, mainly due to the negative biases in the effective soil temperature that is derived from a climate model. However, the SMAP product well captures the amplitude and temporal variation of the soil moisture. The SMOS product performs well in Naqu network with acceptable error metrics but fails to capture the temporal variation of soil m