Soil moisture retrieval from single-polarized measurements of well-calibrated radars for bare soil surfaces

A new inversion algorithm is developed based on an empirical scattering model for retrieving soil moisture and surface roughness of a bare soil surface from a temporal data set of single-polarized measurements of a well-calibrated radar. At first, a surface roughness parameter (surface RMS height) is estimated from a series of temporal radar data (at least two data sets) using its possible distributions, then the soil moisture contents of the bare surfaces are retrieved from the radar data of the bare soil surfaces. The estimated soil moisture contents and surface RMS heights from COSMO-SkyMed SAR data sets are compared with the field-measured surface parameter data to show the accuracies of the inversion algorithms.