The REFLEX 2012 campaign was initiated as part of a training course on the organization of an airborne campaign to support advancement of the understanding of land-atmosphere interaction processes. This article describes the campaign, its objectives and observations, remote as well as in situ. The observations took place at the experimental Las Tiesas farm in an agricultural area in the south of Spain. During the period of ten days, measurements were made to capture the main processes controlling the local and regional land-atmosphere exchanges. Apart from multi-temporal, multi-directional and multi-spatial space-borne and airborne observations, measurements of the local meteorology, energy fluxes, soil temperature profiles, soil moisture profiles, surface temperature, canopy structure as well as leaf-level measurements were carried out. Additional thermo-dynamical monitoring took place at selected sites. After presenting the different types of measurements, some examples are given to illustrate the potential of the observations made.

The objective of this project is to develop a quantitative and operational system for nationwide drought monitoring and drought impact assessment for application in agriculture, water resources and environmental management in China using ESA, Chinese and other relevant satellite data as major data source in combination with other data source (e.g. meteorological and drought statistics, etc.). An extension to drought prediction and adaptation to climate change will be made compared to the Dragon I drought monitoring project. In detail the project aims to generate: (1) a real time drought monitoring and prediction system, (2) improved understanding of land surface processes and land-atmosphere interactions over different terrains (e.g. agriculture land, forest, Gobi desert, high plateau, polar environment), (3) improved algorithms for estimation of land surface parameters and heat fluxes, (4) assessment of economic loss caused by drought and adaptation measures under climatic change, (5) training of young scientists in the area of water, climate and environment. In this contribution, progresses in retrievals of soil moisture using data from different methods are addressed, including in-situ observations, direct retrievals using data from satellite sensors and numerical modeling. The used sensors include ASAR, ASCAT, and AMSR-E. The accuracy of available soil moisture products are assessed using in-situ data collected by the Tibetan Plateau soil moisture monitoring network developed for this and other projects.