An Empirical Relationship of Bare Soil Microwave Emissions Between Vertical and Horizontal Polarization at 10.65 GHz

Land surface microwave emission is mainly a function of soil moisture and surface roughness. However, the relationship between vertical and horizontal polarization land surface emissivities is not fully understood. This study attempts to develop a parameterized relationship to relate the emissivities at different polarizations for bare surfaces. A microwave emission database is simulated for bare surfaces with a wide range of surface roughness and dielectric properties using the Dobson model and the Advanced Integral Equation Model (AIEM) at 10.65 GHz under the configuration of the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer-Earth Observing System (AMSR-E). By analyzing the factors that influence microwave emission, parameterized relationships between vertical and horizontal polarization emissivities are established. With the proposed relationships, the effects of soil moisture and surface roughness on the soil microwave emission signal can be separated. Simulated results using the proposed relationships are compared with those of the AIEM. These results show that the proposed relationships are accurate, with absolute root mean square errors (RMSEs) of 0.0025, and they can be used as a reliable boundary condition to retrieve other surface geophysical parameters. Combining this relationship with the calculated soil moisture, the RMSE of the estimated soil moisture is 0.44% using simulated data. As an example, observations of AMSR-E are used to estimate the variation in soil moisture in Saharan Africa in 2004. By comparing with independent soil moisture data, the result shows that the proposed relationship is promising for retrieving surface geophysical parameters from microwave observations.