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Since December 2008 the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) has been disseminating global 25 km ASCAT surface soil moisture data in near real-time (within 135 minutes after sensing) over its broadcast system EUMETCast. The ASCAT surface soil moisture product is thus the first truly operational satellite soil moisture product that may be used for Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP), flood forecasting and other time-critical applications. In this paper we provide information about the status of the ASCAT Level 2 soil moisture processor, review first published validation and application studies and discuss plans for further improvements.
Wagner et al. (Thu,) studied this question.