Developing a soil inversion model framework for regional permafrost monitoring

• Main Authors: Yi, Yonghong, Chen, Richard H., Nicolsky, Dmitry, Moghaddam, Mahta, Kimball, John S., Romanovsky, Vladimir E., Miller, Charles E.
• Format: Report
• Language: English
• Published: Pasadena, CA: Jet Propulsion Laboratory, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 2019 2020
• Subjects: Arctic; Active layer thickness; permafrost; Tundra; Alaska
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2014/50401

Currently, the community lacks capabilities to assess and monitor landscape scale permafrost active layer dynamics over large extents. To address this need, we developed a concept of a remote sensing based Soil Inversion Model for regional Permafrost (SIM-P) monitoring. The current SIM-P framework includes a satellite-based soil process model and a soil dielectric model. We are also working on incorporating a radar scattering model for Arctic tundra into the SIM-P framework. A unified soil parameterization scheme was developed to harmonize key soil thermal, hydraulic and dielectric parameters in the soil process and radar models that can be used in the joint soil-radar inversion framework. The soil parameter retrievals of the SIM-P framework include soil organic content (SOC) and active layer thickness (ALT). Initial tests of SIM-P using in-situ soil permittivity observations showed reasonable accuracy in predicting site-level SOC and soil temperature profiles at an Alaska tundra site and ALT in Arctic Alaska. SIM-P will be further tested using airborne P- and L-band radar data collected during NASA’s Arctic Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) to evaluate the sensitivity of longwave radar to active layer properties. NASA/JPL