Soil moisture is critical to the ecological stability and hydrological cycle. Optical remote sensing is severely constrained by cloud cover, snow, and frozen soil in alpine regions, hindering long-term soil moisture monitoring. Taking Nagqu region in the Tibetan Plateau as the study area, this paper constructs a pure microwave soil moisture inversion framework based on multi-temporal Sentinel-1 SAR data to avoid optical data dependence. Four SAR vegetation indices (DpRVI, RVI, DpSVI and PRVIc) were integrated into the coupled WCM–Oh2004 model to dynamically correct vegetation attenuation and surface scattering. The results show that the DpRVI-based model performs best, with R = 0.85 and RMSE = 0.0709 cm3/cm3, outperforming other indices. The framework maintains stable accuracy in the growing season and effectively captures spatiotemporal soil moisture variations. The proposed SAR-only method agrees well with official downscaled soil moisture products, proving its applicability for continuous soil moisture monitoring in optically inaccessible alpine regions.
Soil moisture is a critical state variable in land–atmosphere interactions and the hydrological cycle. Owing to its all-weather and all-day observation capability, passive microwave remote sensing has become an important technique for regional soil moisture monitoring. However, most existing passive microwave soil mois...
Xiang-Dong Qin, Zhi-Guo Pang, Jing-Xuan Lu et al.· Remote Sensing· 0 citations
Surface soil moisture (SM) and freeze–thaw (FT) state are key components of the terrestrial system and are recognized as Essential Climate Variables due to their influence on hydrological, ecological, and energy exchange processes. While in situ observation networks provide accurate point-based measurements, their spar...
Victoria Halvorson, E. Deeb, C. Wagner et al.· 0 citations
Soil Moisture (SM) represents the temporary storage of water within the shallow layers of the Earth’s upper surface and plays a key role in a wide range of applications, including hydrological processes, numerical weather prediction models and landslide prediction. This study evaluates the comparability of multiple sat...
Luca Repetto, F. Silvestro, F. Gardella et al.· Remote Sensing· 0 citations
Expansive soils are rich in hydrophilic clay minerals, and repeated wetting–drying cycles can induce deformation that threatens infrastructure safety. Therefore, accurate monitoring of soil moisture (SM) dynamics is essential for understanding hydro-mechanical processes and assessing related geohazards. In this study,...
Soil moisture (SM) is a key parameter in surface water and energy cycles, playing a vital role in agriculture, hydrology, and atmospheric science. Remote sensing (RS) has been widely applied in SM retrieval, yet most existing reviews focus on individual data sources or specific methodologies, lacking a systematic pathw...
