Response of L-Band brightness temperatures to freeze/thaw and snow dynamics in a prairie environment from ground-based radiometer measurements

Land surface freeze/thaw (F/T) dynamics impact the surface energy balance, carbon fluxes, and hydrologic processes. Recent and on-going L-Band (≈ 1.4 GHz) spaceborne missions have the potential to provide enhanced information on F/T state over large geographic regions with rapid revisit time. However, the low spatial resolution of these spaceborne observations (≈ 45 km) makes it difficult to isolate the primary contributions to the F/T signal, including the soil, snow, and vegetation states. A ground-based L-Band radiometer measurement campaign was conducted in Saskatchewan, Canada during the winter of 2014–2015 to evaluate brightness temperature sensitivity to F/T processes, snow, liquid water in snow and assess theoretical retrievals of soil permittivity (eG), and snow density from experimental data. The ground-based radiometer was run in multiple configurations. First, temporally continuous measurements were conducted through the winter over an agricultural field, with a comprehensive network of reference snow and soil observations characterizing the F/T state of the soils within or adjacent to the radiometer footprint. Secondly, weekly multi-angular L-Band measurements were made at an undisturbed site of naturally accumulating snow cover, over a site that was kept snow free, and a site with artificially compacted snow. Results from the assessment of the land surface F/T retrieval algorithm showed that L-Band measurements are sensitive to the near surface F/T state of the soil, with the highest level of agreement found between the near surface (2.5 cm) F/T reference measurements of soil temperature and eG (accuracies of 91.1% and 92.9%, respectively). Several mid-winter melt events with air temperatures (Tair) above 0°, and soil temperatures below 0 °C, illustrated that liquid water within the snow dramatically increase the TB, resulting in false retrievals of soil thaw events using existing L-Band F/T retrieval algorithms. However, Tair was also shown to have a high commission errors compared to radiometer observations in detecting snow melt, because of the delay between Tair > 0 °C and the onset of melt resulting in a measurable wet snow signal at L-Band. The retrieval of snow density (ρs), of the bottom 10 cm of the snowpack tended to underestimate high ρs (> 400 kg m− 3), and agreed well for lower ρs (