Synergistic Evaluation of Passive Microwave and Optical/IR Data for Modelling Vegetation Transmissivity towards Improved Soil Moisture Retrieval

Vegetation cover and soil surface roughness are vital parameters in the soil moisture retrieval algorithms. Due to the high sensitivity of passive microwave and optical observations to Vegetation Water Content (VWC), this study assesses the integration of these two types of data to approximate the effect of vegetation on passive microwave Brightness Temperature (BT) to obtain the vegetation transmissivity parameter. For this purpose, a newly introduced index named Passive microwave and Optical Vegetation Index (POVI) was developed to improve the representativeness of VWC and converted into vegetation transmissivity through linear and nonlinear modelling approaches. The modified vegetation transmissivity is then applied in the Simultaneous Land Parameters Retrieval Model (SLPRM), which is an error minimization method for better retrieval of BT. Afterwards, the Volumetric Soil Moisture (VSM), Land Surface Temperature (LST) as well as canopy temperature (T-C) were retrieved through this method in a central region of Iran (300 x 130 km(2)) from November 2015 to August 2016. The algorithm validation returned promising results, with a 20% improvement in soil moisture retrieval.

Automated summary

This study evaluates the influence of vegetation on soil moisture retrieval by integrating passive microwave and optical observations and proposes a new index named POVI to improve the representation of vegetation. The modified vegetation transmissivity is applied in the soil moisture retrieval model for more accurate estimation.