Retrieval of soil and vegetation features from passive microwave measurements

Passive microwave measurements are sensitive to several geophysical parameters of interest to assess global energy and water balance of vegetation‐covered land surfaces: surface temperature, soil moisture and vegetation water content. Depending on the conditions of the study (sensor performance, spatial and temporal resolution of the microwave observations, observed vegetation canopy, ground measurement availability, etc.), numerous approaches have been used to retrieve surface parameters from passive microwave signatures. In this paper a survey of current retrieval methods together with examples of potential applications of passive microwave measurements over vegetation cover are presented. Considering the large number of input parameters contributing to the microwave emission, efforts have to be made to integrate a priori information and synthetic description of vegetation effects into the inversion algorithms.