If you live in the Carman area, you may notice a DC3 airplane flying frequently overhead the early part of summer.

The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) along with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) are moving into the next phase of an experiment to measure soil moisture from space. Last year, NASA launched its Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite as a tool to build global soil moisture maps. Now, AAFC research scientist Dr. Heather McNairn says they've teamed up with NASA and will be using this aircraft to carry a radiometer instrument over the Carman area to measure soil moisture through microwave emissions from the earth, similar to pre-satellite launch research that was done in 2012.

McNairn says they'll be using the data from this summer to test the accuracy and information collected by the SMAP satellite.

"The satellite basically collects measurements of energy that are emitted from the earth, and then NASA has these models, or algorithms, we call them, that convert the energy into soil moisture," she says. "Now that the satellite is up, they're using the algorithms they developed using the pre-launch data, and they're applying it to the satellite data. So now the exercise is really to take a look a what the satellite is measuring now that it's in orbit, using those same algorithms."

McNairn says they'll be assessing how well the algorithms work and if they can improve accuracy. She says NASA will be using this data to improve its global soil moisture maps from the SMAP satellite, and in addition, this ground data will be freely available for researchers and scientists from around the world will use.

She says Manitoba was chosen for this experiment because of the weather extremes the province faces, but also because of the variety in soil types.

"We have soils from very, very heavy clays that really retain the soil moisture and they can be very wet, to coarser texture, sort of sandy, loamy soils, so in one area we have a wide range of soils, and that means we have a wide of soil moisture conditions as well," McNairn says. "(The Carman area) also has a very good cropping mix, so there's a lot of different crops."

The airplane will be flying for the experiment until July 22.