"JOURNAL OF RADIO ELECTRONICS" (Zhurnal Radioelektroniki ISSN 1684-1719, N 12, 2018

contents of issue      DOI  10.30898/1684-1719.2018.12.13     full text in Russian (pdf)  

Features of microwave emission of frozen tundra active topsoils in the L-band

 

K. V. Muzalevskiy

Kirensky Institute of Physics of Siberian Bransh of Russian Academy of Sciences,
Akademgorodok 50-38, Krasnoyarsk 660036, Russia

 

The paper is received on December 5, 2018

 

Abstract. In this paper, a coherent model of thermal microwave emission is proposed, which allows, with an error not worse than 0.51 K and a Pearson coefficient of 0.999, to describe the brightness temperature of a non-isothermal active layer with a layered dielectric constant structure. At a frequency of 1.4 GHz the features of radio-thermal emission of the active tundra topsoil with a high content of organic matter were researched depending on the bulk dry density, moisture content and profile of soil temperature. The proposed coherent model of radiothermal emission and a generalized dielectric model of tundra soil with a high content of organic matter were used in this research. It has been established that the magnitude of the polarization index at fixed values of soil density and moisture is determined only by the surface temperature of the topsoil and does not depend on the kind of temperature profile. The effective temperature of the soil carries the basic information about the heterogeneous structure of the active layer. It is shown that the possibility of identifying various soil temperature profiles, as well as measuring the temperature distribution in the surface part of the active layer of tundra soil can be carried out on the basis of polarimetric angular-dependencies of the radio-brightness temperature with an error of about 3K. At the same time, polarimetric angular-dependencies of  brightness temperature also make it possible to determine the sign of the gradient of temperature profiles in the active topsoil. The accuracy of measuring of the soil temperature is limited by the accuracy of radio-brightness temperature observation, the uncertainty of soil moisture and density in the footprint area. If the volumetric soil moisture is known with an error of 0.04 cm3/cm3 or the soil density - with an error of 0.1 g/cm3, then the error in temperature retrieval increases by factors of 2 and 1.5, respectively, in the soil moisture range of 0.2-0.4 cm3/cm3 and 0.4-0.6 cm3/cm3. It is shown that for characteri stic temperature gradients of 0.4-1ºÑ/cm in the active topsoil thickness of 10 cm the thickness of the tundra soil layer forming the thermal radiation decreases by factor of 2.5 from 10cm to 4 cm at increasing of surface soil temperature from -30ºÑ ÷ -20º Ñ to -10º Ñ ÷-5º Ñ in the case of given values of soil density and moisture of 0.15 g/cm3 and 0.42 cm3/cm3, respectively. For all the temperature profiles considered, the thickness of the emission layer linearly decreases by factor of 1.5 with an increasing of soil moisture content  by factor of 3 from 0.2 cm3/cm3 to 0.6 cm3/cm3, and with an increasing of soil density  more than 10 times from 0.05 cm3/cm3 to 0.8 cm3/cm3, the thickness of the emission layer decreases by factor of 3. In the future, the authors plan to investigate issues related to the formation of radio-thermal emission from the active layer of frozen soils, taking into account the density and moisture profiles in the organic and mineral horizon of the tundra active topsoil.

Key words: radiometry, Arctic, radio-brightness temperature, active layer, permittivity, organic soils, soil temperature, soil moisture.

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For citation:

K. V. Muzalevskiy. Features of microwave emission of frozen tundra active topsoils in the L-band. Zhurnal Radioelektroniki - Journal of Radio Electronics. 2018. No. 12. Available at http://jre.cplire.ru/jre/dec18/13/text.pdf

DOI  10.30898/1684-1719.2018.12.13