Fiducial Reference Measurements for Soil Moisture (FRM4SM) is a European Space Agency (ESA) managed project focused, on one hand, on defining procedures and protocols to qualify in situ soil moisture measurements as “FRMs” and, on the other hand, on addressing specific concerns intrinsic to the satellite soil moisture validation strategy (e.g. in situ measurement’s spatial representativeness, and the identification of committed areas for satellite soil moisture validation). The satellite component has, initially, a special emphasis on the ESA SMOS dataset and will be followed by further scatterometer-based (e.g., ASCAT), and SAR-based (e.g., Sentinel-1) soil moisture retrieval products.

The Quality Assurance for Soil Moisture (QA4SM https://qa4sm.eu/ui/home) online validation service is developed as part of FRM4SM.

FRM4SM actively cooperates with the Soil Moisture Metrology (SoMMeT) project, a joint research project within the programme “European Partnership on Metrology” of EURAMET.

FRM4SM is carried out by AWST in collaboration with TU Wien and CESBIO.

Dr. Alexander Boresch
Email: boresch@awst.at
FRM4SM project role: Project manager
Organisation: AWST

Dr. Alexander Gruber
Email: alexander.gruber@geo.tuwien.ac.at
FRM4SM project role: Science lead
Organisation: TU Wien