MIT professor will lead science team for NASA satellite to map Earth's water cycle

The orbiting SMAP satellite will make simultaneous radiometer and radar measurements using a shared reflector antenna that is rotated to scan the Earth surface. The large 6 meter in diameter... Click here for more information.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- MIT Professor Dara Entekhabi will lead the science team designing a NASA satellite mission to make global soil moisture and freeze/thaw measurements, data essential to the accuracy of weather forecasts and predictions of global carbon cycle and climate. NASA announced recently that the Soil Moisture Active-Passive mission (SMAP) is scheduled to launch December 2012.

At present, scientists have no network for gathering soil moisture data as they do for rainfall, winds, humidity and temperature. Instead, that data is gathered only at a few scattered points around the world.

“Soil moisture is the lynchpin of the water, energy and carbon cycles over land. It is the variable that links these three cycles through its control on evaporation and plant transpiration. Global monitoring of this variable will allow a new perspective on how these three cycles work and vary together in the Earth system.” said Entekhabi, director of the Parsons Laboratory for Environmental Science and Engineering in MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.