Assessing the sensitivity of multi-frequency passive microwave vegetation optical depth to vegetation properties

Schmidt, Luisa; Forkel, Matthias; Zotta, Ruxandra-Maria; Scherrer, Samuel; Dorigo, Wouter A.; Kuhn-Régnier, Alexander; van der Schalie, Robin; Yebra, Marta

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-20-1027-2023

Articles | Volume 20, issue 5

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-20-1027-2023

© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Special issue:

Microwave remote sensing for improved understanding of vegetation–water...

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-20-1027-2023

© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 20, issue 5

Research article

|

16 Mar 2023

Research article |

| 16 Mar 2023

Assessing the sensitivity of multi-frequency passive microwave vegetation optical depth to vegetation properties

Luisa Schmidt, Matthias Forkel, Ruxandra-Maria Zotta, Samuel Scherrer, Wouter A. Dorigo, Alexander Kuhn-Régnier, Robin van der Schalie, and Marta Yebra

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-20-1027-2023-supplement

Data sets

The Global Long-term Microwave Vegetation Optical Depth Climate Archive VODCA L. Moesinger, ,W. Dorigo, R. De Jeu, R. Van der Schalie, T. Scanlon, I. Teubner, and M. Forkel https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.2575599

ESA Biomass Climate Change Initiative (Biomass_cci): Global datasets of forest above-ground biomass for the year 2017, v1 M. Santoro and O. Cartus https://doi.org/10.5285/bedc59f37c9545c981a839eb552e4084

MOD15A2H MODIS Leaf Area Index/FPAR 8-Day L4 Global 500m SIN Grid V006 R. Myneni, Y. Knyazikhin, and T. Park https://doi.org/10.5067/MODIS/MOD15A2H.006

Land Cover CCI Product User Guide Version 2 ESA http://maps.elie.ucl.ac.be/CCI/viewer/download.php

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Short summary

Vegetation attenuates natural microwave emissions from the land surface. The strength of this attenuation is quantified as the vegetation optical depth (VOD) parameter and is influenced by the vegetation mass, structure, water content, and observation wavelength. Here we model the VOD signal as a multi-variate function of several descriptive vegetation variables. The results help in understanding the effects of ecosystem properties on VOD.