Comparison of microwave brightness temperature simulated in croplands using L-MEB model in Hiwater with Polarimetric L-band multibeam radiometer

The microwave signal at L-band is very sensitive to the soil moisture due to its penetrability. To analyze an algorithm to retrieve soil moisture at L-band, a simulation of microwave brightness temperature is conducted by using the τ-ω model in this study, and two methods of resampling are compared. One of the brightness temperature simulation is based on the point observation on ground, and the other is from the ground observation data of 1km resolution resampled from point. It turns out the latter method has a smaller error. An airborne L-band data from a Polarimetric L-band Microwave Radiometer (PLMR) acquired during the Hiwater experiment held in the Heihe River Basin in 2012 are used to validate the brightness temperature simulation. And the root-mean-square errors between L-MEB simulated and PLMR are 9K to 12K for V-polarization, and 6K to 8K at H-polarization respectively at different angles.