Push broom microwave radiometer observations of surface soil moisture in Monsoon '90

The push broom microwave radiometer (PBMR) was flown on six flights of the NASA C-130 to map the surface soil moisture over the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service Walnut Gulch experimental watershed in southeastern Arizona. The PBMR operates at a wavelength of 21 cm and has four horizontally polarized beams which cover a swath of 1.2 times the aircraft altitude. By flying a series of parallel flight lines it was possible to map the microwave brightness temperature (TB), and thus the soil moisture, over a large area. ln this case the area was approximately 8 by 20 km. The moisture conditions ranged from very dry, 2% by volume, to quite wet, 15%, after a heavy rain. The rain amounts ranged from less than 10 mm to more than 50 mm over the area mapped with the PBMR. With the PBMR we were able to observe the spatial variations of the rain amounts and the temporal variation as the soil dried. The TB values were registered to a Universal Transverse Mercator grid so that they could be compared to the rain gage readings and to the ground measurements of soil moisture in the 0- to 5-cm layer. The decreases in TB were well correlated with the rainfall amounts, R2