Passive microwave remote sensing for soil moisture retrieval on Tibetan Plateau, China

Soil moisture is an important factor for agricultural production and drought monitoring, and soil moisture retrieval for Tibetan plateau has an important practical significance for global climate change and flood monitoring. In this paper, the radiative transfer progress is built to measure the exchange from the soil surface to vegetation. In order to retrieval the soil moisture, the vegetation optical depth is calculated by microwave polarization difference index (MPDI), and brightness temperature data is obtained by AMSRE L3 data; at the same time, some surface soil parameters such as surface roughness and soil dielectric are estimated by establishing soil dielectric constant model. So the soil moisture result would be calculated by using microwave radiation transfer equation and the soil dielectric constant model. Finally the distribution of the soil moisture on Tibetan Plateau is obtained.