Abstract
During the summer of 2000, the monitoring of the water cycle using ground-based long-term monitoring data began to be used as ground truth for ADEOS-II (Advanced Earth Observing Satellite-II) /AQUA validation in the study area (160 km by 120 km) of the Mongolian Plateau. Since 2002, the AMSR-E (Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer for EOS) has successfully monitored the surface soil moisture on a global scale. In this study, we have attempted to validate the AMSR-E standard algorithm of JAXA using the JAXA standard product data (Ver. 5.0) of the AMSR-E soil moisture estimation and ground-based long-term monitoring data in the study area from 2002 to 2007. Although the standard product slightly overestimated the soil moisture, a good correlation was found between the AMSR-E soil moisture product and the ground-based soil moisture in Mongolia, and a reasonable matching of the change and distribution of soil moisture between them was found. The results suggest that the quality of the standard product of AMSR-E is good and basically useful for surface soil moisture monitoring over large areas of the steppe.
