ROBUST ASSESSMENT OF AN OPERATIONAL ALGORITHM FOR THE RETRIEVAL OF SOIL MOISTURE FROM AMSR-E DATA IN CENTRAL ITALY

In this work, the surface soil moisture (SMC) derived from the AMSR-E acquisitions by using Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) is compared with simulated data obtained from the application of a soil water balance model in central Italy. All the overpasses available for the 9-years lifetime of AMSR-E have been considered for the comparison, which was carried out point by point over a grid of 91 nodes spaced at 0.1x0.1 degrees, roughly corresponding to the Umbria region.