Standing water effect on soil moisture retrieval from L-band passive microwave observations

Abstract

Abstract Passive microwave remote sensing at L-band has been widely acknowledged as the most promising technique to observe the spatial distribution of near surface (top ~ 5 cm) soil moisture at regional to global scales. The launch of the ESA's Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission in 2009 now means that global space-borne brightness temperature observations are available at L-band (1.41 GHz) to estimate soil moisture every 2 to 3 days with a target accuracy of 0.04 m 3 /m 3 . Moreover, NASA's Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite has been launched on 31st January 2015, also carrying an L-band radiometer, together with an L-band radar for downscaling the brightness temperature observations to better than 10 km resolution. At the SMOS/SMAP radiometer scale of ~ 40 km, the presence of water bodies potentially induces an overestimation of retrieved soil moisture, if not carefully accounted for in retrieval models. Such water fraction effects on brightness temperature and soil moisture retrieval accuracy were investigated in this study, using airborne L-band brightness temperature data collected during three Australian field experiments. The water induced brightness temperature effect and water fraction were compared under different resolutions, sampling days, and land surface conditions, showing that the water fraction impact on retrieved soil moisture is independent of scale, but heavily dependent on the soil water content status. Subsequently, the highest water fraction threshold that can be tolerated in order to achieve the 0.04 m 3 /m 3 target accuracy without correction has been determined as 0.08 (actual range is from 0.02 for dry bare soil to 0.08 for wet vegetated soil). Using a MODIS derived water fraction dataset, the water fraction dynamics were also studied over Australia during the ten years from 2001 to 2010. The results show that if the mean water fraction map was used as a static water map to flag or correct water effects, the water body induced soil moisture retrieval error would have exceeded the 0.04 m 3 /m 3 target more than once for 13.5% of the Australian land 40 km sized radiometer pixels; only 0.6% Australian land pixels would have exceeded this target with a frequency of 10 times or more per year.