A unified Hapke-HSR + MARMIT-2 soil radiative transfer model for reflectance simulation under varying moisture conditions

Abstract

Soil radiative transfer models (RTMs) provide a physical basis for interpreting surface reflectance and retrieving land-surface parameters. However, most existing soil RTMs represent either the spectral-directional scattering behavior of dry soils or the moisture-induced absorption effects of wet soils, and a physically consistent formulation capable of jointly describing both processes remains limited. In this study, we develop a unified soil RTM by refining the Hapke-based hyperspectral reflectance model (Hapke-HSR) using dry soil reflectance and dynamically coupling it with the improved multilayer RTM of soil reflectance (MARMIT-2). The proposed Hapke-HSR + MARMIT-2 model explicitly represents the interaction between particle scattering and moisture-dependent absorption and refraction processes, enabling joint spectral-directional simulation of soil reflectance under varying soil moisture conditions. The model is systematically evaluated using eight independent soil spectral databases spanning a wide range of textures and moisture levels. Results show that the Hapke-HSR + MARMIT-2 model consistently improves simulation accuracy and stability relative to the individual Hapke-HSR and MARMIT-2 models, with particularly pronounced gains at high soil moisture regimes (SMC ≥ 30 %). Across all datasets, the proposed model achieves higher performance (R2 = 0.993, RMSE = 0.007) than MARMIT-2 (R2 = 0.983, RMSE = 0.012) and Hapke-HSR (R2 = 0.909, RMSE = 0.028). The proposed framework provides a physically interpretable and extensible basis for soil reflectance modeling and offers a robust foundation for future developments in multi-angular hyperspectral remote sensing and land-surface parameter inversion.