A microwave vegetation water index from passive microwave radiometer data

The vegetation water content (VWC) index has been widely used in agriculture, forestry and hydrology studies. It is also useful in retrieving soil moisture from microwave remote sensing observations. Space-borne and airborne microwave radiometers have widespread utility in soil moisture and vegetation condition retrieval. To simplify the original retrieval algorithm, this paper developed a theoretical microwave vegetation water index (MVWI) from microwave radiometer data, which contains only VWC and a vegetation structure parameter. Based on the MVWI, an efficient VWC retrieval algorithm was developed.