Validation of the Effective Resolution of SMAP Enhanced Resolution Backscatter Products IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing

NASA’s Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mis- sion originally included both passive and active L-band mea- surement capabilities. It was the first satellite instrument to pro- vide global L-band radar observations of normalized radar cross section (σ0) at multiple resolutions. The SMAP radar collected high-resolution ( ∼1–3 km) synthetic aperture radar (SAR) mea- surements over most of the earth’s land mass. It simultaneously