Passive Microwave Remote Sensing of Snow, Soil Moisture, Surface Temperature and Rain

Land surface hydrological conditions have been considered to play an important role in the global and regional climate variability. Especially, snow, soil moisture, surface temperature, vegetation and rain are the key parameters which should be observed in the global scale. In this paper, new algorithms for these land surface hydrological parameters have been developed by introducing frequency and polarization dependencies of these parameters in the microwave radiative-transfer equations. The algorithms were applied to the TRMM Microwave Radiometer. (TMI) and validated by using the ground data obtained in the Tibetan Plateau. The estimated snow, soil moisture, surface temperature, water content of vegetation and rain patterns corresponded reasonably to the observed ones.