Assessment of Soil Moisture SMAP Retrievals and ELBARA-III Measurements in a Tibetan Meadow Ecosystem

This letter presents the results evaluating retrievals of liquid water content (θ
_liq
) performed with a zero-order radiative transfer (τ-ω) model under frozen and thawed soil conditions from Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) and ELBARA-III brightness temperature (T
_B
^p
) measurements collected over a Tibetan meadow ecosystem. A good agreement is found between time series of the SMAP and ELBARA-III measured T
_B
^p
resulting in a Pearson product-moment coefficient (R) larger than 0.87. Differences noted between the two data sets can be associated with discrepancies in θ
_liq
measured in the specific footprints, whereby the SMAP measurements are best explained by the in situ θ
_liq
. Furthermore, the in situ θ
_liq
has a better agreement with the horizontally polarized SMAP and ELBARA-III measurements (THB ) in the cold season, whereas the vertically polarized measurements (TVB ) are1111better correlated with θ
_liq
in the warm season. With the implementation of new vegetation and surface roughness parameterizations for the τ-ω model, the dynamics of in situ θ
_liq
is better reproduced by corresponding retrievals for both frozen and thawed soil conditions, leading to the reduction in the unbiased root-mean-square error (ubRMSE) by more than 31% in comparison with these retrievals using SMAP default parameterizations. Notably, the single-channel algorithm configured with the new parameterizations using SMAP TVB measured during the ascending overpass provides the best θ
_liq
retrievals with a ubRMSE of 0.035 m
³
·m
^-3
that is well within the SMAP mission requirements.