Validation of in Situ Networks Via Field Sampling: Case Study in the South Fork Experimental Watershed

The calibration and validation of soil moisture remote sensing products is complicated by the logistics of installing a soil moisture network for a long term period in an active landscape. Therefore, these stations are located along field boundaries or in non-representative sites with regards to soil type or soil moisture. The representative character of this network can only be established by large scale field sampling to provide a calibration dataset. A team of samplers were deployed twice a week for the summer of 2014 to collect surface soil moisture data across a variety of land covers at 44 sites. These samples were compared and scaled to the domain to get a better understanding of the large scale soil moisture distributions and dynamics. In addition, comparisons are made to the Soil Moisture Ocean Salinity (SMOS) soil moisture product for the length of the network installation.