Effective Surface Roughness Impact in Polarimetric GNSS-R Soil Moisture Retrievals

Abstract

Single-pass soil moisture retrieval has been a key objective of Global Navigation Satellite System-Reflectometry (GNSS-R) for the last decade. Achieving this goal will allow small satellites with GNSS-R payloads to perform such retrievals at high temporal resolutions. Properly modeling the soil surface roughness is key to providing high-quality soil moisture estimations. In the present work, the Physical Optics and Geometric Optics models of the Kirchhoff Approximation are implemented to the coherent and incoherent components of the reflectometry measurements collected by the SMAP radar receiver (SMAP-Reflectometry or SMAP-R). Two surface roughness products are retrieved and compared for a single-polarization approach, critical for single-polarization GNSS-R instruments that target soil moisture retrievals. Then, a polarization decoupling model is implemented for a dual-polarization retrieval approach, where the ratio between two orthogonal polarizations is evaluated to estimate soil moisture. Differences between linear and circular polarization ratios are evaluated using this decoupling parameter, and the theoretical soil moisture error with varying decoupling parameters is analyzed. Our results show a 1-sigma soil moisture error of 0.08 cm3/cm3 for the dual-polarization case for a fixed polarization decoupling value used for the whole Earth, and a 2-sigma error of 0.08 cm3/cm3 when the measured reflectivity and the VOD are used to estimate the polarization decoupling parameter.