Since the late 1970s, satellite passive-microwave brightness temperatures have been a mainstay in remote sensing of the cryosphere. Polar snow and ice-covered ocean and land surfaces are especially sensitive to climate change and are observed to fluc...
This study explores the use of a support vector machine (SVM) as the observation operator within a passive microwave brightness temperature data assimilation framework (herein SVM-DA) to enhance the characterization of snow water equivalent (SWE) ove...
Satellite-borne passive microwave radiometers provide brightness temperature (TB) measurements in a large spectral range which includes a number of frequency channels and generally two polarizations: horizontal and vertical. These TBs are widely used...
A new database, the tropical cyclones passive microwave brightness temperature (TCsBT) database including 6273 overpasses of 503 tropical cyclones (TC) was established from 6-year (2011–2016) Fengyun-3B (FY-3B) Microwave Radiation Imager (MWRI)...
The launch of the SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity) and SMAP (Soil Moisture Active Passive) satellites has led to the development of a series of L-band soil moisture retrieval algorithms. In these algorithms, many input parameters (such as leaf...
Under the background of global climate change, drought is causing devastating impacts on the balance of the regional water resources system. Hydrological drought assessment is critical for drought prevention and water resources management. However, i...
Accurate snow water equivalent (SWE) products are vital for monitoring hydrological processes and managing water resources effectively. However, the coarse spatial resolution (typically at 25 km from passive microwave remote sensing images) of the ex...
This paper coupled a unified passive and active microwave observation operator—namely, an enhanced, physically-based, discrete emission-scattering model—with the community land model (CLM) in a data assimilation (DA) system. By implementi...
Passive microwave remote sensing provides indispensable observations for constructing long-term snow depth records, which are critical for climatology, hydrology, and operational applications. Nevertheless, despite decades of snow depth monitoring, s...
Accurate knowledge of the sea ice parameters, including the thickness and the snow depth over sea ice, are key to both climate change studies and operational forecast in polar regions. The estimation of these parameters mainly relies on satellite bas...
For more than a decade, the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) has used in-situ observations of 2 m temperature and 2 m relative humidity to operationally constrain the temporal evolution of model soil moisture. These observat...
Sea ice motion plays an important role in the seasonal and interannual evolution of the polar sea ice cover. Satellite imagery can be used to track the motion of sea ice via cross-correlation feature tracking algorithms. Such a method has been used f...
Glaciers and icefields are critical components of Earth’s cryosphere to study and monitor for understanding the effects of a changing climate. To provide a regional perspective of glacier melt dynamics for the past several decades, brightness tempera...
A new enhanced resolution gridded passive microwave brightness temperature (TB) product is used to estimate sea ice concentration and motion. The effective resolution of the TBs is found to be roughly twice that of the standard 25 km resolution, thou...
Microwave sensors possess the capacity to effectively penetrate through clouds and fog and are widely used in obtaining soil moisture, atmospheric water vapor, and surface temperature measurements. Long time-series datasets play a pivotal role in cli...
Gridded passive microwave brightness temperatures (TB) from special sensor microwave imager and sounder (SSMIS) instruments on three different satellite platforms are compared in different years to investigate the consistency between the sensors over...
Passive microwave satellite brightness temperatures (TB) that were observed by the F13 Special Sensor Microwave/Imager (SSM/I) and the subsequent F17 Special Sensor Microwave Imager/Sounder (SSMIS) were inter-calibrated using empirical relationship m...
Microwave emissions at the L-band (1–2 GHz) in Antarctica are characterized by a significant contribution of ice layers at great depth, from hundreds to a thousand meters. Brightness temperatures, thus, could provide the internal temperature of...
Falling snow alters its own microwave signatures when it begins to accumulate on the ground, making retrieval of snowfall challenging. This paper investigates the effects of snow-cover depth and cloud liquid water content on microwave signatures of t...
The European Space Agency (ESA) Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission with the MIRAS (Microwave Imaging Radiometer using Aperture Synthesis) L-band radiometer provides global soil moisture (SM) data. SM data and products from remote sensing...
The objective of the Hurricane Imaging Radiometer (HIRAD) is to produce wide-swath images of hurricane wind and rain fields during a single pass from a high-altitude aircraft. This instrument could be a prototype for the next generation of airborne h...
The Canadian Arctic Archipelago (CAA) presents unique challenges to the determination of melt onset (MO) using remote sensing data. High spatial resolution data is required to discern melt onset among the islands and narrow waterways of the region. C...
Discriminating between surface soil freeze/thaw states with the use of passive microwave brightness temperature has been an effective approach so far. However, soil moisture has a direct impact on the brightness temperature of passive microwave remot...
Flying in a non-Sun-synchronous orbit, RapidScat is the first scatterometer capable of measuring ocean vector winds over the full diurnal cycle, instead of observing a given location at a fixed time of day. The non-Sun-synchronous orbit also enables...
Long-term snow depth/snow water equivalent (SWE) products derived from passive microwave remote sensing data are fundamental for climatological and hydrological studies. However, the temporal continuity of the products is affected by the updating or...
Vegetation cover and soil surface roughness are vital parameters in the soil moisture retrieval algorithms. Due to the high sensitivity of passive microwave and optical observations to Vegetation Water Content (VWC), this study assesses the integrati...
Sea level rise related to the melting and thinning of the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS), a subject of growing concern in recent years, will eventually affect the global climate. Although the melting of snow on the GrIS is actively monitored by passive m...
A study was conducted to determine the age dependence of the temperature of the low back in the region of the five lumbar vertebrae by using passive microwave radiometry (MWR). The rationale for the study is that the infrared brightness on which the...
In this paper, we implemented the in-situ observation of surface soil moisture (SSM), vegetation water content (VWC), and microwave brightness temperatures. By analyzing this in-situ observation dataset and the numerical simulation, we investigated t...
This paper proposes a novel approach for hydrometeor classification using passive microwave observations. The use of passive measurements for this purpose has not been extensively explored, despite being available for over four decades. We utilize th...
The statistical retrieval of atmospheric parameters will be greatly affected by the accuracy of the simulated brightness temperatures (BTs) derived from the radiative transfer model. However, it is challenging to further improve a physical-based radi...
Synthetic aperture imaging radiometers (SAIRs) are powerful passive microwave systems for high-resolution imaging by use of synthetic aperture technique. However, the ill-posed inverse problem for SAIRs makes it difficult to reconstruct the high-prec...
In this study, we address the variations of bare soil surface microwave brightness temperatures and evaluate the performance of a dielectric mixing model over the desert of Kuwait. We use data collected in a field survey and data obtained from NASA S...
Owing to the temporal and spatial variability of the emissivity spectra, problems remain in the interpretation and application of satellite passive microwave data over vegetation-covered surfaces. The commonly used microwave land emissivity model, de...
Mapping drought from space using, e.g., surface soil moisture (SSM), has become viable in the last decade. However, state of the art SSM retrieval products suffer from very poor coverage over northern latitudes. In this study, we propose an innovativ...
For the elimination of radio-frequency interference (RFI) in a passive microwave radiometer, the threshold level is generally calculated from the mean value and standard deviation. However, a serious problem that can arise is an error in the retrieve...
Surface soil moisture (SSM) is a critical land surface parameter affecting a wide variety of economically and environmentally important processes. Spaceborne microwave remote sensing has been extensively employed for monitoring SSM. Active microwave...
Passive microwave sensors use a radiative transfer model (RTM) to retrieve soil moisture (SM) using brightness temperatures (TB) at low microwave frequencies. Vegetation optical depth (VOD) is a key input to the RTM. Retrieval algorithms can analytic...
A digital automatic gain compensation (AGC) drone-borne K-band microwave radiometer with continuous high-speed acquisition and fast storage functions is designed and applied to obtain high-resolution radiation brightness temperature (TB) images. In t...
Long and consistent soil moisture time series at adequate spatial resolution are key to foster the application of soil moisture observations and remotely-sensed products in climate and numerical weather prediction models. The two L-band soil moisture...
A method to identify and mitigate radio frequency interference (RFI) in microwave radiometry based on the use of a spectrum analyzer has been developed. This method has been tested with CAROLS L-band airborne radiometer data that are strongly corrupt...
Owing to the inherently lower sensitivity of microwave aperture synthesis radiometers (ASRs), Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite brightness temperature (TB) measurements exhibit significantly greater system noise than real-aperture mic...
The present study demonstrates the successful use of the high sensitivity of L-band brightness temperatures to snow liquid water in the retrieval of snow liquid water from multi-angular L-band brightness temperatures. The emission model employed was...
The purpose of this paper is to present a new method for early detection of forest fires, especially in forest zones prone to fires using microwave remote sensing and information-modeling tools. A decision-making system is developed as a tool for ope...
Microwave Imager Combined Active and Passive (MICAP), which is a package of active and passive microwave instruments including L/C/K-band radiometers and L-band scatterometer, has been approved to be taken onbord the Chinese Ocean Salinity Mission. T...
The space-borne microwave radiometers and scatterometers can effectively measure global sea surface winds under non-precipitation. However, the measurements in rainy conditions significantly degrade, which are usually flagged as poor quality or inval...
The Antarctic ice sheet, Earth’s largest ice mass, is vital to the global climate system. Analyzing its thermal behavior is crucial for sea-level projections and ice shelf assessments; however, internal temperature studies remain challenging du...
Passive microwave (PMW) sensors are popularly applied to Earth observations. However, the satellite PMW radiometer data sometimes have non-negligible errors in geolocation. Coastline inflection methods (CIMs) are widely used to improve geolocation er...
Passive microwave measurements have been available on satellites back to the 1970s, first flown on research satellites developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Since then, several other sensors have been flown to retriev...
Passive microwave remote sensing is one of the most promising techniques for soil moisture retrieval. However, the inversion of soil moisture from brightness temperature observations is not straightforward, as it is influenced by numerous factors suc...
of 3