Microwave snow emission modeling of boreal forest environments

This study focuses on the coupling of the Canadian land surface scheme (CLASS) and a radiative transfer model (RTM) to simulate brightness temperature (TB) in boreal forest environments. A parameterization of winter vegetation emission and transmission is proposed to improve the winter TB simulations. When compared to AMSR-E observations, RMSE values of 8K at 37 GHz, 5 K at 19 GHz and 3 K at 10 GHz were obtained. It is also shown that ice crusts have an important impact on the TB in H-pol at the three frequencies. Despite the low sensitivity of microwaves in dense forest, the study provides an interesting tool for the assimilation of TB for SWE retrieval in CLASS.