USING TRMM SATELLITE C BAND DATA TO RETRIEVE SOIL MOISTURE ON THE TffiETAN PLATEAU

Soil moisture, through its dominance in the exchange of energy and moisture between the land and atmosphere, plays a crucial role in influencing atmospheric circulation. To identify the crucial role, it is a common agreement that knowledge of land surface processes and development of remote sensing techniques are of great important scientific issues. This research uses TRMM satellite C band (10.65 GHz) data to retrieve soil moisture on the Tibetan Plateau in Mainland China. Two retrieval schemes that are implemented include the t-(J) model and the R model. The latter one is developed based on a land surface process and radiobrightness (R) model for bare soil and vegetated terrain. Compared with the in situ ground measurements, the soil moisture retrieved from the R model and the t-(J) model with vegetation information obviously appear more accurate than that derived from bare soil model. Retrieved soil moisture contents from the two inversion models, R model and t-(J) model, have a similar trend, but the former appears to be superior in terms of correlation coefficient and bias compared with in situ data. In the future, we will apply the R model with the TRMM 10.65 GHz brightness temperature to monitor long-term soil moisture variation over Tibet Plateau.