The estimation of soil moisture from ERS wind scatterometer data over the Tibetan plateau

With the consideration of microwave radiation transfer process, physically based simple algorithms have been proposed to estimate land surface soil Fresnel reflectivity or soil moisture and vegetation fractional coverage from ERS wind scatterometer data. The proposed algorithms have been successfully applied over the Tibetan plateau there large amount of ground measurements are available from the Intensive Observation Period (IOP'98) field campaign in 1998 of the Global Energy and Water Experiment (GEWEX) Asian Monsoon Experiment in Tibet (GAME/Tibet). The variation tendency of the retrieved monthly soil moisture variable is in good agreement with both local monthly precipitation and ground measured volumetric soil moisture. The regional distribution of land surface soil moisture and vegetation fractional coverage are in agreement with ground measurement and consistent with the local climatic characteristics. If the discrepancies of the geographical co-ordinates and the different spatial resolutions are carefully considered. the retrieved result and its validations can be considered successful. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.