Dataset of Sentinel-1 surface soil moisture time series at 1 km resolution over Southern Italy

Abstract

This paper describes the specifications of the surface soil volumetric water content (Θ) [m3/m3] product derived from Sentinel-1 (S-1) data and assessed in the study “Sentinel-1 soil moisture at 1 km resolution: a validation study” [1]. The S-1 Θ product consists of Θ mean and standard deviation values at 1 km spatial resolution and is expected to support applications in agriculture and hydrology as well as the Numerical Weather Prediction at regional scale [2]. The retrieval algorithm is a time series based short term change detection that is implemented in the “Soil MOisture retrieval from multi-temporal SAR data” (SMOSAR) code (v2.0). The provided dataset represents an example of the developed S-1 Θ product and consists of a time series of 183 S-1 Θ images over Southern Italy from January 2015 to December 2018. The maps were produced for each ascending S-1 acquisition date on the Relative Orbit Number (RON) 146 and the temporal gap between consecutive maps is 6 days (when both S-1A and S-1B data are available) or 12 days.

Keywords

• Surface soil moisture
• High resolution
• Sentinel-1
• Synthetic aperture radar (SAR)
• Time series
• Short term change detection