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Low-frequency microwave brightness temperature is strongly affected by near-surface soil moisture; therefore, it can be assimilated into a land surface model to improve modeling of soil moisture and the surface energy budget. This study presents a new variational land system used to assimilate AMSR-E brightness temperature of vertical polarization of 6.9 GHz and 18.7 GHz. The system consists of a land surface model (LSM) used to calculate surface fluxes and soil moisture, a radiative transfer model (RTM) to estimate the microwave brightness temperature, and an optimization scheme to search for optimal values of soil moisture by minimizing the difference between modeled and observed brightness temperature. The LSM is an improved simple biosphere model for sparse vegetation modeling and the RTM is a Q-h model that can account for the effects of surface roughness and vegetation. Several parameters …