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<front>
<journal-meta>
<journal-id journal-id-type="publisher">EGUsphere</journal-id>
<journal-title-group>
<journal-title>EGUsphere</journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="publisher">EGUsphere</abbrev-journal-title>
<abbrev-journal-title abbrev-type="nlm-ta">EGUsphere</abbrev-journal-title>
</journal-title-group>
<issn pub-type="epub"></issn>
<publisher><publisher-name>Copernicus Publications</publisher-name>
<publisher-loc>Göttingen, Germany</publisher-loc>
</publisher>
</journal-meta>
<article-meta>
<article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.5194/egusphere-2026-3022</article-id>
<title-group>
<article-title>A Maxwell-Based Dual-Morphology Wet Snow Microstructure Model for Liquid Water Amount Retrieval in Greenland&amp;rsquo;s Percolation Zone Using SMAP L-Band Radiometry</article-title>
</title-group>
<contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Jiang</surname>
<given-names>Hui</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0009-0002-4255-4696</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Borah</surname>
<given-names>Firoz</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Tsang</surname>
<given-names>Leung</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3192-2799</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Huang</surname>
<given-names>Zhenming</given-names>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">
<sup>1</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Hossan</surname>
<given-names>Alamgir</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0605-0976</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">
<sup>2</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
<contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Colliander</surname>
<given-names>Andreas</given-names>
<ext-link>https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4093-8119</ext-link>
</name>
<xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff3">
<sup>3</sup>
</xref>
</contrib>
</contrib-group><aff id="aff1">
<label>1</label>
<addr-line>Radiation Laboratory, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor,  MI 48109, USA</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff2">
<label>2</label>
<addr-line>Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, La Cañada Flintridge, CA 91011, USA</addr-line>
</aff>
<aff id="aff3">
<label>3</label>
<addr-line>Finnish Meteorological Institute, Helsinki, 00560, Finland</addr-line>
</aff>
<pub-date pub-type="epub">
<day>14</day>
<month>07</month>
<year>2026</year>
</pub-date>
<volume>2026</volume>
<fpage>1</fpage>
<lpage>29</lpage>
<permissions>
<copyright-statement>Copyright: &#x000a9; 2026 Hui Jiang et al.</copyright-statement>
<copyright-year>2026</copyright-year>
<license license-type="open-access">
<license-p>This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this licence, visit <ext-link ext-link-type="uri"  xlink:href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</ext-link></license-p>
</license>
</permissions>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-3022/">This article is available from https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-3022/</self-uri>
<self-uri xlink:href="https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-3022/egusphere-2026-3022.pdf">The full text article is available as a PDF file from https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2026/egusphere-2026-3022/egusphere-2026-3022.pdf</self-uri>
<abstract>
<p>Liquid water amount (LWA) in seasonal snow controls meltwater retention, refreezing, and runoff. The retrieval of LWA from L-band brightness temperature (TB) observations remains highly sensitive to the effective permittivity of wet snow. Classical wet snow microstructure studies indicate that low liquid water content (LWC) wet snow contains both interfacial/contact-scale liquid and thicker localized pore-space water, whereas existing mixing formulas assume a single liquid water morphology. In this paper, we introduce a Maxwell-based dual-morphology wet-snow model that partitions liquid water between thin-coated interfacial water and localized thicker Tri-continuous (Tri-C) water through a morphology parameter (&lt;em&gt;&amp;alpha;&lt;/em&gt;) defined as the fraction of the total liquid water assigned to the thin-coated component. A permittivity database generated from computer-generated microstructures and numerical Maxwell solutions is used to train a neural-network emulator for retrieval. For a representative case with LWC = 2 % and snow density 400 &lt;em&gt;kg&lt;/em&gt;/&lt;em&gt;m&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sup&gt;3&lt;/sup&gt;, varying &lt;em&gt;&amp;alpha;&lt;/em&gt; from 0 to 1 increases the imaginary part of the effective permittivity by a factor of 37, demonstrating first-order morphology-control on L-band dielectric loss. We combine this model with a two-layer radiative transfer framework and a temporally constrained inversion of the vertically and horizontally polarized SMAP TB at six Greenland percolation-zone AWS sites (CP1, DY2, KAN_U, NSE, SDL, and SDM) to retrieve &lt;em&gt;&amp;alpha;&lt;/em&gt;, LWC, wet layer thickness, and LWA. The retrieval reproduces the observed morning-pass seasonal evolution and suggests relatively larger thin-coated contributions at melt onset, Tri-C dominance during peak melt, and an incomplete late-season return toward thin-coated dominance, likely due to incompletely refrozen earlier meltwater. These results show that explicit liquid-water morphology can substantially improve L-band retrieval of wet snow compared with traditional mixing models.</p>
</abstract>
<counts><page-count count="29"/></counts>
<funding-group>
<award-group id="gs1">
<funding-source>National Aeronautics and Space Administration</funding-source>
<award-id>23-SMAP23-0032</award-id>
</award-group>
</funding-group>
</article-meta>
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