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Full-Text Articles in Earth Sciences
Application Of A Hillslope-Scale Soil Moisture Data Assimilation System To Military Trafficability Assessment, Alejandro N. Flores, Dara Entekhabi, Rafael L. Bras
Application Of A Hillslope-Scale Soil Moisture Data Assimilation System To Military Trafficability Assessment, Alejandro N. Flores, Dara Entekhabi, Rafael L. Bras
Geosciences Faculty Publications and Presentations
Soil moisture is an important environmental variable that impacts military operations and weapons systems. Accurate and timely forecasts of soil moisture at appropriate spatial scales, therefore, are important for mission planning. We present an application of a soil moisture data assimilation system to military trafficability assessment. The data assimilation system combines hillslope-scale (e.g., 10s to 100s of m) estimates of soil moisture from a hydrologic model with synthetic L-band microwave radar observations broadly consistent with the planned NASA Soil Moisture Active–Passive (SMAP) mission. Soil moisture outputs from the data assimilation system are input to a simple index-based model for vehicle …