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Remotely sensed soil moisture studies have mainly focused on retrievals using active and passive microwave (MW) sensors, which provide measurements that are directly related to soil moisture (SM). MW sensors have obvious advantages such as the ability to retrieve through nonprecipitating cloud cover which provides shorter repeat cycles. However, MW sensors offer coarse spatial resolution and suffer from reduced retrieval skill over moderate to dense vegetation. A unique avenue for filling these information gaps is to exploit the retrieval of SM from thermal infrared (TIR) observations, which can provide SM information under vegetation cover and at significantly higher resolutions than MW. Previously, an intercomparison of TIR‐based and MW‐based SM has not been investigated in the literature. Here a series of analyses are proposed to study relationships between SM products during a multiyear period …