Multifractals in soil moisture and implementation for microwave remote sensing interpretation

This paper provides a basic understanding of the multiscaling property of soil moisture and quantitative description of the high degree of spatial variability. Soil moisture content exhibits remarkably strong heterogeneous spatial structure. Scaling properties of such a structure need studying for two reasons: to understand the properties of the geosystem and to find how to interpret soil moisture quantitatively by using microwave remote sensing with different spatial resolution unambiguously. The purpose of this paper is to explore the physical basis of soil moisture distribution and implication of multiffactality with a view to develop some understanding of multiscaling behaviour. Multiscaling in soil moisture provides the theoretical basis for validation of microwave data by using field measurements. It relies on the extrapolation power law dependence for quantitative interpretation microwave remote sensing data. This approach was studied in the experiment over a podzolic soil, peat soil and marshy area in the European part of Russia. To gain some qualitative insight into the multifractal behaviour of water content in soil a model of binary multiplicative process was introduced. The multifractal in soil moisture appears to provide a valuable framework on which the extrapolation to a minimal scale can be based.