The P-band Synthetic Aperture Radar aboard the JSC G-III has embarked on the second half of the 2017 ABoVE (Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment) Airborne Campaign in Canada/Alaska.  Data was acquired over AirSWOT flight tracks near Saskatoon and boreal forest over the BERMS site, imaged large transects of boreal forest in eastern Alberta, as well as Fort Resolution, the mouth of Slave River at the southern shore of Great Slave Lake.   

The AIRMOSS Project has officially ended at the end of FY’16.  The project has met or exceeded all level 1 requirements and completed the task on schedule and budget.

Upon completion of the P-band radar observations of root zone soil moisture (RZSM) for the AirMOSS mission, the P-band radar aboard the JSC G-III transited to Fairbanks to observe RZSM in the permafrost region as part of an Interdisciplinary Science task led by Dr. Mahta Moghaddam of USC.  The Fairbanks local flight consisted of ten flight lines (see map) that provided a sampling of the landscape north and west of Fairbanks.  Several of the flight lines covered boreholes operated by University of Alaska, which will enable scientists to correlate radar observations to borehole observations.

AirMOSS mission reached a significant milestone yesterday as we successfully completed all the P-band radar observations of root zone soil moisture for the entire mission, thus meeting the baseline science requirement for science observations.  Over the past 3 years we have conducted 186 science flights over the selected nine biomes in North America during the growth season, which amounted to over 1200 hours including engineering and transit flights.

The P-band radar is conducting its last east coast deployment observing Harvard/Howland forests in New England and Duke Forest in North Carolina.   JPL's science team members are conducting field measurements at all three biomes with the help of graduate students from UCLA and local schools.  At JPL, polarimetric processing of both flight days over the Alaksa Sitka landslide area has been completed.  Attached is a three-polarization color composite of one transect over Baranof Island and Sitka Sound.  Repeat-pass interferometric processing will follow this week.

The P-band radar completed the Alaska permafrost observation last weekend.  In addition, the radar made two observations over the Sitka landslide area in the southeastern tip of Alaska on August 28 and 31 respectively.  The crossing flight lines are shown in the graphics below and we will attempt to reconstruct the 3-dimensional deformation signals from interferometric data sets acquired 3 days apart.  Repeat-pass interferometry with the P-band radar has recently been demonstrated with data acquired in Harvard Forest.

We have successfully completed our very last campaign over the Marena, Oklahoma In-Situ Sensor Testbed (MOISST) grasslands site.  In all, we conducted three flights over MOISST on August 7, 11, and 15 respectively.  The first flight was coincident with COSMOS rover soil measurements performed by Oklahoma State University.  The AirMOSS observations over Walnut Gulch in conjunction with the SMAP cal/val campaign is nearly completed as well, having flown 5 flights on August 8, 10, 13, 16, and 18 respectively.

The AirMOSS pod was re-integrated to the JSC Gulfstream-III on July 30.  Since then, AirMOSS has successfully completed four science data collections.  Two of the collections imaged the Walnut Gulch site in Arizona and are part of the SMAP calibration/validation field campaign called SMAPVEX15.  These collections were coincident with the overflight of the SMAP satellite.  The other two collections imaged the Marena, Oklahoma In Situ Sensor Testbed (MOISST) grasslands site.

The P-band radar onboard the JSC G-III was deployed in Saskatoon, Canada for the boreal forest observation (first of three observations this year).  Our study site is at the southern end of a number of large wildfires raging in Saskatchewan, Canada.  We were able to add two flight lines to our last (of three) flights to image the wildfire scars on July 5, 2015 (see graphic).  The raw data are being returned to JPL for processing.  Our pilot-in-command for the deployment, Tom Ryan, was interviewed on CBC Radio broadcast in Canada.

The processing of AirMOSS science data is progressing as planned, with many new L2/3-RZSM and L4-RZSM products being delivered to the LP-DAAC.  The attached image tonzi-example.png shows an example of a recent retrieval of soil moisture profile at the Tonzi Ranch site, where the retrieval accuracy is seen to be between 0.035 m3/m3 and 0.054 m3/m3 for different in-situ profiles.