[1] The radar backscattering coefficient is mainly determined by surface soil moisture, vegetation and land surface roughness under a given configuration of the satellite sensor. It is observed that the temporal variations of the three variables are different, the variation of vegetation and roughness are at the longer temporal scales corresponding to climate and cultivation practices, while so...

A linear relationship between ERS-2 SAR backscattering coe cient (s0 ) and volumetric soil moisture was determined at both ends of a rainfall gradient in Israel. A Normalized radar Backscatter soil Moisture Index (NBMI) was derived and related strongly to soil moisture concentration. This index may allow the mapping of soil moisture conditions over large areas with C band SAR data.

This paper describes the first outcomes of an activity aiming at validating the H-SAF soil moisture products derived from METOP-ASCAT data. For this purpose, an extensive comparison between SMOS and ASCAT derived soil moisture retrievals has been accomplished by considering the 25 km resolution ASCAT products and the SMOS level 2 products. Both Europe and Northern Africa have been considered an...

[1] An analytical algorithm for the determination of land surface temperature and soil moisture from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission/Microwave Imager (TRMM/TMI) remote sensing data has been developed in this study. The error analyses indicate that the uncertainties of the enrolled parameters will not cause serious errors in the proposed algorithm. By applying the proposed algorithm to T...

The radar signal recorded by earth observation (EO) satellites is sensitive to soil moisture and surface roughness, which both influence the onset of runoff. This paper focuses on inversion of these parameters using a multi-angular approach based on RADARSAT-1 data with incidence angles of 35 and 47 (in mode S3 and S7). This inversion was performed with three backscatter models: Geometrical Opt...

Remotely sensed soil moisture products derived from the Advanced SCATterometer (ASCAT) and from the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) radiometer are analyzed and compared. The comparison has been carried out within the framework of an activity aiming at validating the EUMETSAT Hydrology Satellite Application Facility (H-SAF) soil moisture products derived from ASCAT over Europe and North ...

Surface soil moisture is important to understand environmental systems and dielectric constant is a convenient physical parameter to describe this. Dielectric Mixing models relate the effective dielectric constant of a heterogeneous medium with the properties of constituent materials. The dielectric properties of the soil is known to have dependence on Soil moisture content along with other fac...

A multilayer soil model for retrieving soil moisture content using the Integral Equation Method (IEM) is investigated in this paper. The total reflection coefficients of the natural soil are obtained using the multilayer model, and volumetric scattering is approximated by the internal reflections between layers. The surface reflection terms in IEM model are replaced by the total reflection coef...