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The application of Soil-Vegetation-Atmosphere-Transfer (SVAT) scheme into the estimation of soil moisture profile in semi-arid regions is largely constrained by a scarcity of spatially distributed soil and hydraulic property information. Especially, on a large scale in very dry and sandy soils or other extreme conditions, it is difficult to accurately map soil and hydraulic properties with soil maps-based Pedo-Transfer Functions (PTFs), because PTFs are usually semi-empirically defined for specific sites. One strategy to overcome this limitation is to employ satellite data for a purpose of calibration. This paper provides an operational framework of inverting the SVAT soil hydraulic variables from the deterministic ensemble Kalman filter (DEnKF) analysis of Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) surface soil moisture product. This inverse calibration was first verified with the Analyses Multidisciplinaires de la Mousson Africaine (AMMA) super site data representative of a single grid cell (0.25 degrees) of satellite data. At this local scale, the results demonstrated that the mis-estimation problems of soil surface variable C-1 and equilibrium soil moisture theta(geq) were successfully solved after calibration, demonstrating a better agreement with the field measurement of soil moisture profile than the SMOS product and un-calibrated SVAT scheme using soil maps-based PTFs. On the meso scale, the calibrated SVAT scheme using inverted surface variables appropriately captured a non-linear relationship between surface and root zone soil moisture by showing a typical soil moisture profile in dry climates, where dry surface soil moisture is spatially consistent with rainfall events, but wet root zone soil moisture shows low correlations with surface soil moisture distributions and rainfall events. In contrast, the un-calibrated SVAT scheme using soil maps-based PTFs significantly overestimated surface soil moisture and rainfall effect. This approach suggests several operational merits in that there is no need to heavily rely on empirically defined PTFs or recalibrate land surface parameters for different land surface conditions, and this can be applied even when parameter measurements are unavailable or highly uncertain. Crown Copyright (C) 2013 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.