Analysis of a Least-Squares Soil Moisture Retrieval Algorithm from L-band Passive Observations

Abstract: The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission of the European SpaceAgency (ESA), launched on November 2009, is an unprecedented initiative to globallymonitor surface soil moisture using a novel 2-D L-band interferometric radiometer concept.Airborne campaigns and ground-based field experiments have proven that radiometersoperating at L-band are highly sensitive to soil moisture, due to the large contrast betweenthe dielectric constant of soil minerals and water. Still, soil moisture inversion from passivemicrowave observations is complex, since the microwave emission from soils dependsstrongly on its moisture content but also on other surface characteristics such as soil type,soil roughness, surface temperature and vegetation cover, and their contributions must becarefully de-coupled in the retrieval process. In the present study, different soil moistureretrieval configurations are examined, depending on whether prior information is used in theinversion process or not. Retrievals are formulated in terms of vertical (

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