Remote Sensing of Soil Moisture Retrieval with Radar, Radiometer, and GNSS-R

Dear Colleagues,

Soil moisture is identified as an Essential Climate Variables by the Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) given its role in the Earth and Climate systems. Its estimation is crucial for monitoring the processes at the soil-vegetation-atmosphere interface that control the water, energy and carbon budgets. It is therefore required for scientific and operational applications related to agriculture, hydrology, meteorology and climatology. Furthermore, knowledge of soil moisture is also relevant for phyto-sanitary issues, ecology and bio-geochemical cycles. Thanks to their sensitivity to the water content of the target via its dielectric constant, the all-weather microwaves have demonstrated unique potential for estimating surface soil moisture, which in turn is used by the mean of the different approaches to estimate soil moisture in the root zone. There exists a wide range of soil moisture approaches and products derived from active and passive microwave data with different resolutions and accuracies. However, the evaluation of these soil moisture products highlights the need for further improvements in the spatial and temporal resolutions, accuracy and genericity of the approaches over different types of vegetation, soils and climates.

This Special Issue aims to present recent reviews and advances of general interest in the use of remote sensing observations for soil moisture monitoring. It focuses on approaches using microwave remote sensing data from existing satellites, whether passive (radiometers: SMOS, SMAP, AMSR-E, etc.) or active (SARs and scatterometers: ASCAT, SAR: Sentinel-1, Radarsat, TerraSAR, ALOS/PALSAR, SAOCOM, etc.), as well as GNSS-R instruments and ground and airborne experiments. The submissions that are focusing on the synergy of microwaves with optical, thermal data and other EO data are also encouraged.

This Special Issue supports research articles and reviews. The Special Issue is focusing, but is not limited to the following research topics:

• Surface and root zone soil moisture estimation from microwave passive and active data (SAR, scatterometers, radiometers, GNSS-R, etc.), including sensors of different bands (X, C, L, P, etc.), whether spaceborne, airborne (aircrafts and UAVs) or ground-based experiments.
• Downscaling of existing coarse-resolution microwave products.
• Soil moisture applications including but not limited to: Irrigation managements, plant transpiration, water stress detection, flood monitoring, precision agriculture, drainage, drought monitoring, yield forecasting, rainfall, soil degradation , etc.
• Historical datasets and/or long time series analysis on agricultural lands and forests in relation to the effects of climate change, drought.., etc.
• Seasonal dynamics of soil moisture and drydowns in relation to food security.
• Review, anomalies and inter-comparaison studies of different soil moisture products.
• Defining hydrological regimes.
• Identifying areas unsuitable for planting and defining crop planting strategies.

Dr. Nadia Ouaadi
Dr. Nicolas Baghdadi
Dr. Mehrez Zribi
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• surface soil moisture
• root zone soil moisture
• synthetic-aperture radar
• radiometers
• GNSS-R
• microwave
• field experiments