A modeling study on the use of passive microwave data for the monitoring of sparsely vegetated land surfaces

Presents some aspects of a scheme which uses remote sensing measurements to control the simulations of a coupled land surface process and passive microwave radiative transfer model. Based on an iterative minimization procedure, the scheme estimates model input parameters or initial conditions. The study focuses on the feasibility of the scheme and its sensitivity to errors. It is shown that important parameters can be retrieved with the scheme, and that the parameters to which the simulations are most sensitive, are also those which are more liable to be retrieved satisfactorily in the presence of noise.