Microwave vegetation index from SMOS

Monitoring global vegetation can be of importance in understanding land surface processes and their interactions with the atmosphere, biogeochemical cycle, and primary productivity. Previous research has shown that vegetation indices have become essential tools in this field. In this study, we will explore and demonstrate a new technique for deriving Microwave Vegetation Indices (MVIs) using the passive microwave radiometer SMOS data. It provides the global microwave brightness temperature observations at L-band (1.4 GHz) with dual polarizations (V, H) and a range of viewing angles [2]. The SMOS MVIs A parameter was negatively related to NDVI while the B parameter is positively related to NDVI. Compared with WindSat MVIs, SMOS MVIs have similar global distribution patterns but can indicate different vegetation information mainly because of penetrability and incidence angle variation. Based on analysis using BARC 1980 data, SMOS MVI_B is linearly related to LAI.