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Operative Objective Analysis of Productive Moisture Fields in the Top Soil Layer: Day-to-Day Variability
Soil moisture is one of the components of water balance in nature. Traditionally, during the growing season of agricultural crops, hydrometeorological stations evaluate the amount productive moisture located in the layers 0-10, 0-20, 0-50 and 0-100 cm.
We also use information from polar orbital MetOp-A and MetOp-B satellites (and are going to add the information from MetOp-C) with measuring devices – scatterometers ASCAT. Their measurements permit to evaluate humidity in the upper (about 5-cm) soil layer, using remote sensing (ERS). The data is quickly distributed to the meteorological center via the system of data exchange EUMETSAT. We use both types of the information for our daily operative objective analysis (OOA) of soil productive moisture in the top (0-10 cm) and arable (0-20 cm) soil layers, see Fig.1. A considerable part of Russian agricultural areas are located in the European territory, and there is a rather a dense network of Roshydromet stations making observations of the reserves of soil moisture 3 times a month.