Analysis of a Least-Squares Soil Moisture Retrieval Algorithm from L-band Passive Observations

The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission of the European Space Agency (ESA), launched on November 2009, is an unprecedented initiative to globally monitor surface soil moisture using a novel 2-D L-band interferometric radiometer concept. Airborne campaigns and ground-based field experiments have proven that radiometers operating at L-band are highly sensitive to soil moisture, due to the large contrast between the dielectric constant of soil minerals and water. Still, soil moisture inversion from passive microwave observations is complex, since the microwave emission from soils depends strongly on its moisture content but also on other surface characteristics such as soil type, soil roughness, surface temperature and vegetation cover, and their contributions must be carefully de-coupled in the retrieval process. In the present study, different soil moisture retrieval configurations are examined, depending on whether prior information is used in the inversion process or not. Retrievals are formulated in terms of vertical (Tvv) and horizontal (Thh) polarizations separately and using the first Stokes parameter (TI), over six main surface conditions combining dry, moist and wet soils with bare and vegetation-covered surfaces. A sensitivity analysis illustrates the influence that the geophysical variables dominating the Earth’s emission at L-band have on the precision of the retrievals, for each configuration. It shows that, if adequate constraints on the ancillary data are added, the algorithm should converge to more accurate estimations. SMOS-like brightness temperatures are also generated RemoteSensing 2010, 2 353 by the SMOS End-to-end Performance Simulator (SEPS) to assess the retrieval errors produced by the different cost function configurations. Better soil moisture retrievals are obtained when the inversion is constrained with prior information, in line with the sensitivity study, and more robust estimates are obtained using TI than using Tvv and Thh. This paper analyzes key issues to devise an optimal soil moisture inversion algorithm for SMOS and results can be readily transferred to the upcoming SMOS data to produce the much needed global maps of the Earth’s surface soil moisture.