Estimate of soil moisture using refined microwave vegetation index based on AMSR-E

Surface soil moisture is an essential variable in hydrological process. A physically based statistical methodology for surface soil moisture retrieval in the SNOTEL-770 station was examined in this study. This approach uses MVIs-B parameter to minimize the vegetation effects. And by adding the weighted emissivity at two polarizations, the surface roughness effects are eliminated. Considering the noisy behavior of MVI-B might limit its applications, in this study, we attempted to use the Fourier analysis to refine the MVI. The methodology was tested against the SNOTEL-770 station with experimental data sets collected from Climate Change Initiative (CCI) Soil Moisture project and was shown to be an effective method of soil moisture retrieval for areas with sparse vegetation coverage.