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Passive microwave brightness temperatures from the Nimbus-7 Scanning Multichannel Microwave Radiometer (SMMR) can be used to infer the soil moisture content over agricultural areas such as the southern Great Plains of the United States. A linear regression analysis between three transforms of the five dual polarized SMMR wavelengths of 0.81, 1.36, 1.66, 2.80 and 4.54 cm and an antecedent precipitation index representing the precipitation history showed correlation coefficients greater than 0.90 for pixel aggregates of 25–50 km. The use of surface air temperatures to approximate the temperature of the emitting layer was not required to obtain high correlation coefficients between the transforms and the antecedent precipitation index.
Wilke et al. (Sat,) studied this question.