Developing a soil inversion model framework for regional permafrost monitoring

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.