Impact of Soil Salinity on Soil Dielectric Constant and Soil Moisture Retrieval From Active Microwave Remote Sensing

Soil salinity plays a key role in influencing the soil dielectric constant and soil backscatter coefficient. However, soil moisture (SM) retrieval models constructed based on active microwave data hardly consider soil salinity. Thus, obtaining the SM datasets with various salinity on regional and local scales is difficult. This study aimed to employ theoretical model simulation to investigate the errors of SM retrieval due to not considering the impact of soil salinity. Then, three typical saline soil dielectric constant models were validated and compared based on the experimental measurement datasets. Results show that the WYR saline soil dielectric constant model has excellent performance. The soil salinity mainly affects the imaginary part of the dielectric constant and the effect of salinity on the soil dielectric constant is more significant when the SM has larger values. In addition, in retrieving SM with soil salinity more than 10 g/kg, the retrieval result of SM has an absolute error of 0.04 m(3)/m(3) and a relative error of 5% when not considering the soil salinity impact. In retrieving SM with soil salinity less than 10 g/kg, the retrieved SMerror increased by 2%, and the absolute error increased by 0.01 m(3)/m(3) as soil salinity increased by 3 g/kg. We believe that The study will give a theoretical reference for establishing the SM retrieval model in saline soil areas using microwave data.

Automated summary

This study investigated the errors in soil moisture retrieval due to the absence of considering soil salinity impact. Three typical saline soil dielectric constant models were validated, with the WYR model showing excellent performance. The study found that soil salinity mainly affects the imaginary part of the dielectric constant, and the impact is more significant for higher soil moisture values.