Coupled hydrologic-electromagnetic approach for mapping water and carbon characteristics of permafrost active layer.

In this paper, a coupled hydrologic-electromagnetic approach is presented to model the behavior of organic soil dielectric properties. A detailed soil texture analysis that accounts for root biomass (RB), soil organic matter (SOM), and the mineral fraction (Min) enables characterizing the soil water retention curve (SWRC) parameters. The bound water amount is inferred from the permanent wilting point calculated from SWRC and is incorporated as a subphase into a soil dielectric mixing model. The carbon and water characteristic in the subsurface are modeled as profile functions of total organic matter (OM) and water saturation fraction (SW). This profile model is developed in support of the P- and L-band polarimetric synthetic aperture radar observations of the Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) airborne campaign, which will use the model to retrieve subsurface OM and SW profile functions.