Pan-tropical soil moisture mapping based on a three-layer model from CYGNSS GNSS-R data

In this paper, an effective schematic is developed for estimating soil moisture (SM) from CYclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS) data. Here, a three-layer model of air, vegetation cover, and soil is considered. In practice, the surface reflectivity (Γ) along with its statistics derived from the CYGNSS data and the ancillary vegetation opacity (τ) data from Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) are employed. The expression for...