Ricerc@Sapienza

Data from the CYGNSS mission, originally conceived to monitor tropical cyclones, are being investigated here for land applications as well. In this paper, a methodology for soil moisture (SM) retrieval from CYGNSS data is presented. The approach derives Level 3 gridded daily SM estimations, over the latitudinal band covered by CYGNSS, at a resolution of 36 km × 36 km, using the CYGNSS reflectivity over land, coupled with ancillary vegetation and roughness information from the SMAP mission.

The triple collocation (TC) technique is being increasingly used to validate soil moisture retrievals derived from different systems, like satellites, hydrological models, or in situ probes. In recent years, several extensions of this method were proposed in order to evaluate the error standard deviations of more than three systems and to soften the TC hypothesis.