Feasibility of Retrieving Soil Moisture from InSAR Decorrelation Phase and Closure Phase

Phase inconsistencies, or closure phase, in interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) images are associated with the lack of phase closure for any given triplet of SAR scenes. While nonzero phase closure is fundamentally due to signal decorrelation between SAR scenes within a triplet, there has been particular interest in relating closure phase to temporal variations in surface scattering properties, namely surface and near-subsurface soil moisture state. In this manuscript, we will provide a brief overview of closure phase, and propose a methodology for retrieving soil moisture information from closure phase observations. We will briefly discuss implementation of this methodology, and then discuss the degree to which the assumed interferometric soil moisture model, and the assumed statistics of suface scatterers impacts the sensitivity of closure phase observations to surface soil moisture.