Empirical determination of the soil emissivity at L-band: Effects of soil moisture, soil roughness, vine canopy, and topography

Existing L-band land emission models are being improved with radiometric data to be applied in the Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity mission retrieval algorithms. A set of experiments have been carried out in the past years by the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya to assess the impact of different soil and vegetation properties on the L-band radiometric signal: soil texture and moisture profile, surface roughness, vine canopy, and topography. This paper presents and discusses their results.