Effect of dew on aircraft-based passive microwave observations over an agricultural domain

Abstract

Microwave remote sensing can provide reliable measurements of surface soil moisture. However, some land surface conditions can have a perturbing influence on soil moisture retrievals. In the soil moisture experiments in 2005 (SMEX05), we attempted to contribute to the understanding of the effect of dew using concurrent ground and aircraft observations. Early morning flights were conducted with an airborne microwave radiometer from June 19 to July 2, 2005, in Iowa, USA over an agricultural domain. Results of the experiment indicated that dew had a small but measurable effect on the observed 10.7-GHz brightness temperatures. The results indicate that the H-pol emissivity increased 0.015 to 0.04 for the corn sites, 0.014 to 0.02 for soybean, and 0.01 for forest sites as dew evaporated. These results suggest that the presence of dew decreases X-band land surface emissivity slightly and the effect of dew varies with vegetation types. Our findings are consistent with other works in the literature that has found that the effect of dew depends on both the type of vegetation and the wavelength of observation, but further studies should be conducted to verify this hypothesis.