Vegetation Optical Depth Retrieval from CYGNSS Data

The Cyclone Global Navigation Satellite System (CYGNSS) observation received the Global Positioning System (GPS) signals with a revisit time in the range of 2.8 to 7.2 hours and have about a few kilometers of spatial resolution for coherent reflection and ∼25 km for incoherent reflection [1]. The CYGNSS datasets have a great potential to provide the vegetation optical depth (VOD) by combining the soil moisture data from SMAP. In this paper, we developed a physical-based model to retrieve the VOD. The retrieved VOD has been compared with SMAP VOD in both regional and global scale.