Retrieval of soil moisture and vegetation canopy parameters with L-band radar for a range of boreal forests

In this paper, we study the radar retrieval of soil moisture and canopy parameters in a forested area. The for ward model is a discrete scatterer radar model and the inverse model implements a global optimization scheme known as simulated annealing. Inversion is first applied to synthetic data assuming hypothetical allometric relationships to make the retrieval possible by reducing the number of unknowns. The inversion algorithm is then validated using data from the Canadian Experiment for Soil Moisture in 2010 (CanEx-SMlO) acquired with the NASA/JPL UAVSAR in June 2010 in central Canada boreal forests in support of the pre-launch calibration and validation activities of NASA´s Soil Moisture Active and Passive (SMAP) mission.