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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Estimating Gravimetric Moisture of Vegetation Using an Attenuation-Based Multi-Sensor Approach

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description

Estimating parameters for global climate models via combined active and passive microwave remote sensing data has been a subject of intensive research in recent years. A variety of retrieval algorithms has been proposed for the estimation of soil moisture, vegetation optical depth and other parameters. A novel attenuation-based retrieval approach is proposed here to globally estimate the gravimetric moisture of vegetation (m g ) and retrieve information about the amount of water [kg] per amount of wet vegetation [kg]. The parameter m g is particularly interesting for agro-ecosystems, to assess the status of growing vegetation. The key feature of the proposed approach is that it relies on multi-sensor data from three sensor types (microwave radar, microwave radiometer, and lidar) to solve the physics equations and obtain m g -estimates. The comparability of these estimates to literature values as well as to results of a globally applied, retrieval approach of Grant [4], reveal the potential of the developed method.