Recently, a research team led by Associate Professor Tan Shurun at Zhejiang University-University of Illinois Urbana Champaign Institute (ZJUI) has achieved progress in microwave remote sensing. The work was recently published in IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing. The paper is authored by Zhang Tengfeng, a 2023 master’s student in Electronic Information, as the first author, with Associate Professor Tan Shurun serving as the sole corresponding author. 

This study focuses on L-band microwave remote sensing over vegetated land surfaces, where complex interactions between vegetation, soil and electromagnetic waves, along with the associated scattering processes, have long posed fundamental challenges to accurate radiative transfer modeling and biophysical parameter retrieval. To address this long-standing bottleneck, the team developed a unified active microwave radiative transfer model that comprehensively characterizes the physical mechanisms governing microwave propagation and scattering across vegetated environments.

Validation against in-situ field experimental data demonstrates that the model can consistently interpret and jointly reproduce both active and passive microwave observations using a single, consistent set of physical parameters, while achieving robust, high predictive accuracy. This work provides a more coherent physical foundation for synergistic radar-radiometer observations in forest and agricultural landscapes, and enables improved high-accuracy retrieval of key biophysical variables, including soil moisture and vegetation water content.