A reappraisal of global soil effective temperature schemes

Abstract

Abstract Traditionally, effective soil temperature (Teff) has been considered to be a secondary intermediate variable in microwave radiative transfer theory. However, its impact on microwave radiometry is comparable to that of vegetation cover, soil surface roughness and dielectric constant. Teff is defined as the weighted temperature of the emitting layers, where the weighting involved depends on the soil moisture profile. In this study, we evaluate the suitability of various models for estimating Teff using temperature and moisture profiles obtained from a land surface model. MERRA-Land (the Modern-Era Retrospective analysis for Research and Applications-Land) soil moisture profiles and temperature profiles were used to reproduce global Teff data sets with single parameter schemes (e.g. the Beta Soil Moisture Active Passive, SMAP scheme), two-parameter Choudhury's schemes (e.g. the current SMAP's scheme), two-parameter Wigneron schemes (e.g. the current Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity scheme, SMOS), and multilayer Teff schemes (e.g. Lv′s scheme). The results show that differences in Teff between these schemes are usually