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Title: Estimation of Soil Moisture With Dual-Frequency-PALS

Author
item SHI, J - UNIV OF CALIFORNIA SB
item NJOKU, E - NASA JPL
item Jackson, Thomas
item O'NEILL, P - NSAS GSFC
item CHEN, K - NATIONAL CENTRAL UNIV

Submitted to: International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium Proceedings
Publication Type: Proceedings
Publication Acceptance Date: 7/5/2008
Publication Date: 12/22/2008
Citation: Shi, J., Njoku, E.G., Jackson, T.J., O'Neill, P., Chen, K.S. 2008. Estimation of soil moisture with dual-frequency-PALS. In: Proceedings of the International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium, July 7-11, 2008, Boston, Massachussetts. p. II73-II76.

Interpretive Summary:

Technical Abstract: The purpose of this study is to evaluate whether the NASA/JPL dual frequency airborne system, Passive Active L-band and S-band (PALS), can provide a reliable soil moisture measurements so that they can be integrated to provide soil moisture data at the scales of the spaceborne coarse resolutions. Through evaluations of the AIEM simulated the random rough surface emissivities with a wide range of soil moisture and roughness conditions at both L-band and S-band, it was found that the bare surface emission signals at above two frequencies are essentially close to identical regardless of the surface soil moisture and roughness properties when the effect of soil properties (temperature and moisture) in the vertical profile on emission signals is minor. This makes it possible to further estimate the vegetation components in the '-t model at each frequency and polarization and to carry out the corrections for the vegetation effects without assumption on polarization dependence of the vegetation effects. Thus, the surface soil moisture can be inferred by the estimated surface emission signals. An evaluation and validation of this technique with the airborne PALS measurements obtained during SMEX’02 soil moisture experiment with the intensive ground soil moisture measurements is presented.