Soil Moisture Estimations Based on Airborne CAROLS L-Band Microwave Data

Remote Sensing

Mickaël Pardé³  Mehrez Zribi²  Jean-Pierre Wigneron⁵  Monique Dechambre³  Pascal Fanise²  Yann Kerr²  Marc Crapeau⁵  Kauzar Saleh¹  Jean-Christophe Calvet⁴  Clément Albergel⁴  Arnaud Mialon² 

[1] MICINN, CDTI, Cid, 4, 28001 Madrid, Spain; E-Mail:;CESBIO (UPS/CNRS/IRD/CNES), 18 Avenue Edouard Belin, bpi 2801, 31401 Toulouse Cedex 9, France; E-Mails:;LATMOS, Route de Troux, 78280 Guyancourt, France; E-Mails:;CNRM-GAME, Météo-France, CNRS, URA 1357, 42 Avenue Gaspard Coriolis, 31057 Toulouse, France; E-Mails:;INRA, EPHYSE, 71 Avenue Edouard Bourlaux, 33140 Villenave d’Ornon, France; E-Mails:

关键词: soil moisture;    CAROLS;    L-band;    L-MEB;    soil roughness;   

DOI  :  10.3390/rs3122591

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

The SMOS satellite mission, launched in 2009, allows global soil moisture estimations to be made using the L-band Microwave Emission of the Biosphere (L-MEB) model, which simulates the L-band microwave emissions produced by the soil–vegetation layer. This model was calibrated using various sources of in situ and airborne data. In the present study, we propose to evaluate the L-MEB model on the basis of a large set of airborne data, recorded by the CAROLS radiometer during the course of 20 flights made over South West France (the SMOSMANIA site), and supported by simultaneous soil moisture measurements, made in 2009 and 2010. In terms of volumetric soil moisture, the retrieval accuracy achieved with the L-MEB model, with two default roughness parameters, ranges between 8% and 13%. Local calibrations of the roughness parameter, using data from the 2009 flights for different areas of the site, allowed an accuracy of approximately 5.3% to be achieved with the 2010 CAROLS data. Simultaneously we estimated the vegetation optical thickness (τ) and we showed that, when roughness is locally adjusted, MODIS NDVI values are correlated (R² = 0.36) to τ. Finally, as a consequence of the significant influence of the roughness parameter on the estimated absolute values of soil moisture, we propose to evaluate the relative variability of the soil moisture, using a default soil roughness parameter. The soil moisture variations are estimated with an uncertainty of approximately 6%.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2011 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.