Validation of the acquisition algorithms for FSSCat’s Soil Moisture product

Abstract

This essay presents a validation of two months (October-November 2020) of soil moisture retrieved by the FSSCat mission by comparing it with the ESA Climate Change Initiative mission (ESA CII) dataset. A data processing pipeline, along with various statistical tests, was designed to detect disparities between the two datasets. The results with RMSE, Bias, and ubRMSE revealed notable discrepancies in some regions, such as Russia, with values of 0.1 m3/m3 for the ubRMSE. In general, FSSCat’s data has underestimated measurements compared to ESA CII’s dataset. These discrepancies can be attributed to instrumental errors, the presence of ice in certain regions, and uncertainties in the re-gridding method.