Evaluation of Soil Moisture Retrievals from a Portable L-Band Microwave Radiometer

A novel Portable L-band radiometer (PoLRa), compatible with tower-, vehicle- and drone-based platforms, can provide gridded soil moisture estimations from a few meters to several hundred meters yet its retrieval accuracy has rarely been examined. This study aims to provide an initial assessment of the performance of PoLRa-derived soil moisture at a spatial resolution of approximately 0.7 m × 0.7 m at a set of sampling pixels in central Illinois, USA. This preliminary evaluation focuses on (1) the consistency of PoLRa-measured brightness temperatures from different viewing directions over the same area and (2) whether PoLRa-derived soil moisture retrievals are within an acceptable accuracy range. As PoLRa shares many aspects of the L-band radiometer onboard NASA’s Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission, two SMAP operational algorithms and the conventional dual-channel algorithm (DCA) were applied to calculate volumetric soil moisture from the measured brightness temperatures. The vertically polarized brightness temperatures from the PoLRa are typically more stable than their horizontally polarized counterparts across all four directions. In each test period, the standard deviations of observed dual-polarization brightness temperatures are generally less than 5 K. By comparing PoLRa-based soil moisture retrievals against the simultaneous moisture values obtained by a handheld capacitance probe, the unbiased root mean square error (ubRMSE) and the Pearson correlation coefficient (R) are mostly below 0.05 m3/m3 and above 0.7 for various algorithms adopted here. While SMAP models and the DCA algorithm can derive soil moisture from PoLRa observations, no single algorithm consistently outperforms the others. These findings highlight the significant potential of ground- or drone-based PoLRa measurements as a standalone reference for the calibration and validation of spaceborne L-band synthetic aperture radars and radiometers. The accuracy of PoLRa-yielded high-resolution soil moisture can be further improved via standardized operational procedures and appropriate tau-omega parameters.