THE STUDY ON THE SEMI-EMPIRICAL SOIL MODELS FOR IMPROVING THE GNSS-R SM RETRIEVAL

Abstract. Soil moisture (SM) is one of the important physical properties of soil and plays an important role in agricultural production. Global Navigation Satellite System Reflectometry (GNSS-R) SM retrieval is based on the concept of receiving GPS signals reflected by the ground using a passive receiver. Although many research has been reported showing the capability of the GNSS-R technique on SM application. Due to the diversity of soil types and the complexity of soil composition, the study of soil permittivity is still attracting many interesting. This paper presented the investigations on characteristic and performances for different semi-empirical soil models, to reveal and verify the relationship between dielectric constant and SM under different realistic soil compositions. This study is helpful to improve the accuracy for the GNSS-R SM retrieval and can be used to other SM related studies.