International Journal of Digital Earth (Oct 2021)

Assessing the active-passive approach at variant incidence angles for microwave brightness temperature downscaling

  • Peng Guo,
  • Tianjie Zhao,
  • Jiancheng Shi,
  • Hongxin Xu,
  • Xiuwei Li,
  • Shengda Niu

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1080/17538947.2021.1907461
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 14, no. 10
pp. 1273 – 1293

Abstract

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The Terrestrial Water Resources Satellite (TWRS) campaign is a planned Chinese candidate satellite mission, and a one-dimensional synthetic aperture technology will be used, resulting in variant incidence angles for collecting synchronous active-passive observations at L-band, which would make brightness temperature (Tb) downscaling especially challenging when aiming to improve the spatial resolution of soil moisture measurements. In this study, two active-passive Tb downscaling algorithms, the time-series regression (TSR) and spectral analysis (SA) algorithms, are assessed comprehensively based on airborne experimental datasets. The results with data collected during the Soil Moisture Experiment 2002 (SMEX02) showed that both approaches could provide a reliable downscaled Tb at the same incidence angle. Based on the ground and airborne active-passive observations under variant incidence angles from the Soil Moisture Experiment in the Luan River (SMELR) it can be shown that the linear relationship between Tb and σ is still robust under the case of variant incidence angles, and Tb (both h- and v-pol) is better correlated to σvv for most cases than σhh. Both downscaling approaches can be applied to active-passive observations under varying incidence angles. Moreover, SA method performed better than the TSR method according to the lower RMSE values and higher correlation.

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