An Alternative Roughness Parameterization for Soil Moisture Retrievals from Passive Microwave Observations

The usefulness of L-band radiometer observations for the retrieval of near-surface soil moisture has already been demonstrated in many studies. Unfortunately, the ability to estimate soil moisture from these remotely sensed observations is hampered by the infeasibility to characterize the roughness of the soil surface. Given the difficulty to measure in situ soil roughness parameters, improved methodologies to estimate these parameters from observed quantities is a prerequisite to retrieve high quality soil moisture maps from passive microwave observations. This research focusses on an alternative methodology to estimate soil roughness parameters used in the L-band Microwave Emission of the Biosphere model.