Impact of soil permittivity and temperature profile on L-Band microwave emission of frozen soil

An unexplored aspect of L-band microwave emission is the impact of soil moisture and soil temperature (SMST) profile dynamics on diurnal brightness temperature (TB) signatures of frozen soil. This study investigates this effect by comparing the TB simulations of layered (TB,l) and uniform (TB,u) soils using a newly developed integrated land emission model. The multilayer Wilheit model and the single-layer Fresnel model are adopted to compute the smooth soil reflectivity for the layered and uniform soils, respectively. A four-phase dielectric mixing model is used to calculate the soil permittivity (ϵₛ). A data set of concurrent ELBARA-III TB and SMST profile measurements performed in a seasonally frozen Tibetan meadow ecosystem is used for the analysis. The simulated TB,l considering SMST profile information captures well the ELBARA-III measurements with low biases (łe 6 K) and high correlations (R²≥ 0.88). TB,u produced based on the Fresnel model using the soil moisture of 2.5 cm is more consistent with the TB,l. The sensitivity test of averaging SMST profile below 2.5 cm leads to maximum differences of 2 K in TB,l simulations, indicating that the TB variations are primary dominated by the SMST dynamics at the surface layer. A sensitivity test of the Wilheit model to different ϵₛ parameterizations shows that the dielectric model of Zhang et al. is comparable to the four-phase dielectric model in simulating TB,l, while the Mironov et al.'s model demonstrates larger biases for frozen soil with, on average, 2.2% clay content, 49.7% sand content, and a bulk density of 1 g·cm⁻³.