Publication Date

2020

Journal or Book Title

Geophysical Research Letters

Abstract

Soil moisture dynamics in the presence of dense vegetation canopies are determinants of ecosystem function and biogeochemical cycles, but the capability of existing spaceborne sensors to support reliable and useful estimates is not known. New results from a recently initiated field experiment in the northeast United States show that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) SMAP (Soil Moisture Active Passive) satellite is capable of retrieving soil moisture under temperate forest canopies. We present an analysis demonstrating that a parameterized emission model with the SMAP morning overpass brightness temperature resulted in a RMSD (root‐mean‐square difference) range of 0.047–0.057 m3/m3 and a Pearson correlation range of 0.75–0.85 depending on the experiment location and the SMAP polarization. The inversion approach included a minimal amount of ancillary data. This result demonstrates unequivocally that spaceborne L‐band radiometry is sensitive to soil moisture under temperate forest canopies, which has been uncertain because of lack of representative reference data.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1029/2020GL089697

Volume

47

Issue

19

License

UMass Amherst Open Access Policy

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

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