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The NASA SMAP (Soil Moisture Active Passive) mission provides a global coverage of soil moisture measurements based on its L-band microwave radiometer every 2-3 days at about 40 km resolution. The soil moisture retrieval algorithms model the brightness temperature as a function of soil moisture, surface conditions and vegetation. External data sources inform the algorithms about the surface conditions and vegetation, which enable the retrieval of soil moisture. The inversion process contains uncertainties related to radiometer measurements, forward model assumptions and ancillary data sources. This study focuses on the uncertainties that depend on the seasonal evolution of the surface conditions and vegetation. The study compares the SMAP and core validation site (CVS) soil moisture values over a period of four years to extract the evolution of performance metrics over time. The analysis showed that most CVS that include managed agriculture exhibit significant time-dependent seasonal bias. This bias was linked to seasonal temperature cycle, which is a proxy to several features that can cause seasonally dependent errors in the SMAP product.

Satellite-based passive microwave remote sensing typically involves a scanning antenna that makes measurements at irregularly spaced locations. These locations can change on a day to day basis. Soil moisture products derived from satellite-based passive microwave remote sensing are usually resampled to a fixed Earth grid that facilitates their use in applications. In many cases the grid size is finer than the actual spatial resolution of the observation, and often this difference is not well understood by the user. Here, this issue was examined for the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) enhanced version of the passive-based soil moisture product, which has a grid size of 9-km and a nominal spatial resolution of 33-km. In situ observations from core validation sites were used to compute comparison metrics. For sites that satisfied the established reliability and scaling criteria, the impact of validating the 9-km grid product with in situ data collected over a 9-km versus a 33-km domain was very small for the sites studied (0.039 m3/m3 unbiased root mean square difference for the 9-km case versus 0.037 m3/m3 for the 33-km case). This result does not mean that the resolution of the product is 9-km but that for the conditions studied here the soil moisture estimated from in situ observations over 9-km is a close approximation of the soil moisture estimated from in situ observations over the 33-km resolution. The implication is that using the enhanced SMAP product at its grid resolution of 9-km should not introduce large errors in most applications.

Reactions of three different thiocarbonyl S-methylides, generated from thiobenzophenone (2), 2,2,4,4-tetramethyl-3-thioxocyclobutanone (3), and adamantanethione (8), respectively, and diazomethane, with 5-benzylidene-3-phenylrhodanine (12) were carried out. The aromatic thiocarbonyl ylide 1a adds chemoselectively to the C,C-double bond, but the spirocyclic 1,3-dithiolane 18, i.e. the [2+3]-cycloadduct with the C=S group of 12,was also formed as a minor product. In the cases of the aliphatic thiocarbonyl ylides 6 and 20, the [2+3]-cycloaddition occurred at the exocyclic C,C-double bond exclusively to give the spirocyclic tetrahydrothiophene derivatives 23 and 21, respectively. A smooth acid-catalyzed decomposition of 18 yielded the 2-diphenylmethylidene derivative 19. The formation of product 24, which was obtained in the reaction of the sterically congested ylide 6 with 12, is explained by a 1,4-H-shift in an intermediate zwitterionic adduct. The structures of the tetrahydrothiophenes 17, 21 and 23, as well as that of 24, were established by X-ray crystallography.