Modelling of the Soil Moisture Using L-Band Brightness Temperatures from ELBARA III Radiometer

Water resources on Earth become one of the main concerns for the society. Therefore, the remote sensing methods are still under development in order to improve the picture of the global water cycle. In this context, the microwave bands are the most suitable to study land-water resources. The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity, satellite mission of the European Space Agency, is dedicated for studies of the water resources over land. The part of calibration/validation activities is done with ground-based radiometers in order to improve soil moisture retrieval algorithms. In this paper we present results of soil moisture modelling from brightness temperatures measured with the ground-based ELBARA passive radiometer operating at GHz. For the purpose of soil moisture retrieval we use L-band Microwave Emission of the Biosphere model with Simplified Roughness Parametrization. The results reveal that water interception effects play important role in microwave response of the ground, and therefore they may lead to underestimate the modelled soil moisture in a larger scale.