Retrieval of Soil Moisture and Surface Roughness from Backscatter Measurements of Vegetation Canopy

This paper presents an inversion algorithm for retrieving the volumetric soil moisture content and surface rms height from the measured backscattering coefficients of a vegetation canopy. The polarimetric backscattering coefficients of a tall-grass field are measured using a scatterometer at L-band. The water-cloud scattering model for the vegetation canopy are obtained by data-fitting with the measurements. Then, the soil moisture content and surface roughness of the tall-grass field are retrieved using a genetic algorithm. The retrieved soil moisture content and rms surface height of the tall-grass-covered soil surface are compared with the in-situ measured ground truth data, and good agreements between those values are shown.