An improved approach for retrieving soil moisture and surface roughness from passive microwave observation

A new method of retrieving soil moisture and surface roughness parameter concurrently is introduced in this paper. The improved approach is based on the innovated land parameter retrieval model (LPRM) and uses a nonlinear iterative procedure to retrieve the soil moisture and surface roughness. We incorporate the Qp model into the original LPRM, which makes up the weakness in the assumption of model. Through comparing the soil moisture retrieved with the in situ data, we evaluate the performance of the new algorithm and the root-mean-square error (rmse) is less than 0.1m3/m3.