scholarly journals Research on Fusing Multisatellite Soil Moisture Data Based on Bayesian Model Averaging

2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Shan Wang ◽  
Yuexing Wang ◽  
Chi Zhang ◽  
Han Shuai ◽  
Chun-Xiang Shi

Soil moisture (SM) is an important physical quantity that can reflect the land surface condition. There are many ways to measure SM, satellite microwave remote sensing is now considered the primary method because it can provide real-time high-resolution data. However, SM data obtained by satellite remote sensing exhibit certain deviation compared with reference data obtained from ground stations. To improve the accuracy of SM forecasts, this study proposed the use of a Bayesian model averaging (BMA) method to integrate multisatellite SM data. First, China was divided into eight regions. Then, SM data observed by satellites (FY3B, SMOS, and WINDSAT) were fused using the BMA method and a traditional averaging method. Finally, SM data were predicted using data from ground observation stations as a reference standard. Following the fusion process, three parameters (standard deviation, correlation coefficient, and root mean square deviation) were used to evaluate the fusion results, which revealed the superiority of the BMA method over the traditional averaging method.

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 4587-4631 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. B. Anderson ◽  
B. F. Zaitchik ◽  
C. R. Hain ◽  
M. C. Anderson ◽  
M. T. Yilmaz ◽  
...  

Abstract. Drought in East Africa is a recurring phenomenon with significant humanitarian impacts. Given the steep climatic gradients, topographic contrasts, general data scarcity, and, in places, political instability that characterize the region, there is a need for spatially distributed, remotely derived monitoring systems to inform national and international drought response. At the same time, the very diversity and data scarcity that necessitate remote monitoring also make it difficult to evaluate the reliability of these systems. Here we apply a suite of remote monitoring techniques to characterize the temporal and spatial evolution of the 2010–2011 Horn of Africa drought. Diverse satellite observations allow for evaluation of meteorological, agricultural, and hydrological aspects of drought, each of which is of interest to different stakeholders. Focusing on soil moisture, we apply triple collocation analysis (TCA) to three independent methods for estimating soil moisture anomalies to characterize relative error between products and to provide a basis for objective data merging. The three soil moisture methods evaluated include microwave remote sensing using the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer – Earth Observing System (AMSR-E) sensor, thermal remote sensing using the Atmosphere-Land Exchange Inverse (ALEXI) surface energy balance algorithm, and physically-based land surface modeling using the Noah land surface model. It was found that the three soil moisture monitoring methods yield similar drought anomaly estimates in areas characterized by extremely low or by moderate vegetation cover, particularly during the below-average 2011 long rainy season. Systematic discrepancies were found, however, in regions of moderately low vegetation cover and high vegetation cover, especially during the failed 2010 short rains. The merged, TCA-weighted soil moisture composite product takes advantage of the relative strengths of each method, as judged by the consistency of anomaly estimates across independent methods. This approach holds potential as a remote soil moisture-based drought monitoring system that is robust across the diverse climatic and ecological zones of East Africa.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Hirschi ◽  
Bas Crezee ◽  
Sonia I. Seneviratne

<p>Drought events cause multiple impacts on the environment, the society and the economy. Here, we analyse recent major drought events with different metrics using a common framework. The analysis is based on current reanalysis (ERA5, ERA5-Land, MERRA-2) and merged remote-sensing products (ESA-CCI soil moisture, gridded satellite soil moisture from the Copernicus Climate Data Store), focusing on soil moisture (or agricultural) drought. The events are characterised by their severity, magnitude, duration and spatial extent, which are calculated from standardised daily anomalies of surface and root-zone soil moisture. We investigate the ability of the different products to represent the droughts and set the different events in context to each other. The considered products also offer opportunities for drought monitoring since they are available in near-real time.</p><p>All investigated products are able to represent the investigated drought events. Overall, ERA5 and ERA5-Land often show the strongest, and the remote-sensing products often weaker responses based on surface soil moisture. The weaker severities of the events in the remote-sensing products are both related to shorter event durations as well as less pronounced average negative standardised soil moisture anomalies, while the magnitudes (i.e., the minimum of the standardised anomalies over time) are comparable to the reanalysis products. Differing global distributions of long-term trends may explain some differences in the drought responses of the products. Also, the lower penetration depth of microwave remote sensing compared to the top layer of the involved land surface models could explain the partly weaker negative standardized soil moisture anomalies in the remote-sensing products during the investigated events. In the root zone (based on the reanalysis products), the drought events often show prolonged durations, but weaker magnitudes and smaller spatial extents.</p>


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 138 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chaolei Zheng ◽  
Li Jia ◽  
Guangcheng Hu ◽  
Jing Lu

Thailand is characterized by typical tropical monsoon climate, and is suffering serious water related problems, including seasonal drought and flooding. These issues are highly related to the hydrological processes, e.g., precipitation and evapotranspiration (ET), which are helpful to understand and cope with these problems. It is critical to study the spatiotemporal pattern of ET in Thailand to support the local water resource management. In the current study, daily ET was estimated over Thailand by ETMonitor, a process-based model, with mainly satellite earth observation datasets as input. One major advantage of the ETMonitor algorithm is that it introduces the impact of soil moisture on ET by assimilating the surface soil moisture from microwave remote sensing, and it reduces the dependence on land surface temperature, as the thermal remote sensing is highly sensitive to cloud, which limits the ability to achieve spatial and temporal continuity of daily ET. The ETMonitor algorithm was further improved in current study to take advantage of thermal remote sensing. In the improved scheme, the evaporation fraction was first obtained by land surface temperature—vegetation index triangle method, which was used to estimate ET in the clear days. The soil moisture stress index (SMSI) was defined to express the constrain of soil moisture on ET, and clear sky SMSI was retrieved according to the estimated clear sky ET. Clear sky SMSI was then interpolated to cloudy days to obtain the SMSI for all sky conditions. Finally, time-series ET at daily resolution was achieved using the interpolated spatio-temporal continuous SMSI. Good agreements were found between the estimated daily ET and flux tower observations with root mean square error ranging between 1.08 and 1.58 mm d−1, which showed better accuracy than the ET product from MODerate resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS), especially for the forest sites. Chi and Mun river basins, located in Northeast Thailand, were selected to analyze the spatial pattern of ET. The results indicate that the ET had large fluctuation in seasonal variation, which is predominantly impacted by the monsoon climate.


2020 ◽  
Vol 590 ◽  
pp. 125445
Author(s):  
Yong Chen ◽  
Huiling Yuan ◽  
Yize Yang ◽  
Ruochen Sun

Sensors ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (24) ◽  
pp. 5399 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ghassem R. Asrar

A combination of multispectral visible, infra-red and microwave sensors on the constellation of international Earth-observing satellites are providing unprecedented observations for all Earth domains over multiple decades (i.e., atmosphere, land, oceans and polar regions). This Special Issue of Sensors is dedicated to papers that describe such advances in the field of Earth remote sensing and their applications to advance understanding of Earth’s planetary system and applying the resulting knowledge and information to meet the societal needs during recent decades. The papers accepted and published in this issue convey the exciting scientific and technical challenges and opportunities for remote sensing of all domains of Earth system, including terrestrial, aquatic and coastal ecosystems; bathymetry of coasts and islands; oceans and lakes; measurement of soil moisture and land surface temperature that affects both water resources and food production; and advances in use of sun-induced fluorescence (SIF) in measuring and monitoring the contribution of terrestrial vegetation in the cycling of carbon in Earth’s system. Measurements of SIF, for example, has had a profound impact on the field of terrestrial ecosystems research and modelling. The Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC) instrument on the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCVR) satellite located at the Sun–Earth Lagrange Point One, about 1.5 million miles away from Earth, is providing unique observations of the Earth’s full sun-lit disk from pole-to-pole and minute-by-minute, which overcomes a major limitation in temporal coverage of Earth by other polar-orbiting Earth-observing satellites. Active and passive microwave remote sensing instruments allow all-weather measurements and monitoring of clouds, weather phenomena, land-surface temperature and soil moisture by overcoming the presence of clouds that affect measurements by visible and infrared sensors. The use of powerful in-space lasers is allowing scientists and engineers to measure and monitor rapidly changing ice sheets in polar regions and mountain glaciers. These sensors and their measurements that are deployed on major space-based observatories and small- and micro-satellites, and the scientific knowledge they provide, are enhancing our understanding of planet Earth and development of Earth system models that are used increasingly to project future conditions due to Earth’s rapidly changing environmental conditions. Such knowledge and information are benefiting people, businesses and governments worldwide.


2014 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 1293-1302 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Tugrul Yilmaz ◽  
Wade T. Crow

Abstract Triple collocation analysis (TCA) enables estimation of error variances for three or more products that retrieve or estimate the same geophysical variable using mutually independent methods. Several statistical assumptions regarding the statistical nature of errors (e.g., mutual independence and orthogonality with respect to the truth) are required for TCA estimates to be unbiased. Even though soil moisture studies commonly acknowledge that these assumptions are required for an unbiased TCA, no study has specifically investigated the degree to which errors in existing soil moisture datasets conform to these assumptions. Here these assumptions are evaluated both analytically and numerically over four extensively instrumented watershed sites using soil moisture products derived from active microwave remote sensing, passive microwave remote sensing, and a land surface model. Results demonstrate that nonorthogonal and error cross-covariance terms represent a significant fraction of the total variance of these products. However, the overall impact of error cross correlation on TCA is found to be significantly larger than the impact of nonorthogonal errors. Because of the impact of cross-correlated errors, TCA error estimates generally underestimate the true random error of soil moisture products.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 3467-3500 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.-G. Liu ◽  
Z.-H. Xie

Abstract. The quality of soil moisture simulation using land surface models depends largely on the accuracy of the meteorological forcing data. The present study investigated how to reduce the uncertainty arising from meteorological forcings in a simulation by adopting a multiple meteorological forcing ensemble approach. Simulations by the Community Land Model version 3.5 (CLM3.5) over mainland China were conducted using four different meteorological forcings, and the four sets of soil moisture data related to the simulations were then merged using simple arithmetical averaging and Bayesian model averaging (BMA) ensemble approaches. Compared to in situ observations, the four simulations captured the spatial and seasonal variations of soil moisture in most cases with some mean bias. They performed differently when simulating the seasonal phases in the annual cycle, the interannual variation and the magnitude of observed soil moisture over different subregions of mainland China, but no individual meteorological forcing performed best for all subregions. The simple arithmetical average ensemble product outperformed most, but not all, individual members over most of the subregions. The BMA ensemble product performed better than simple arithmetical averaging, and performed best for all fields over most of the subregions. The BMA ensemble approach applied to the ensemble simulation reproduced anomalies and seasonal variations in observed soil moisture values, and simulated the mean soil moisture. It is presented here as a promising way for reproducing long-term, high-resolution spatial and temporal soil moisture data.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yanchen Bo

<p>High-level satellite remote sensing products of Earth surface play an irreplaceable role in global climate change, hydrological cycle modeling and water resources management, environment monitoring and assessment. Earth surface high-level remote sensing products released by NASA, ESA and other agencies are routinely derived from any single remote sensor. Due to the cloud contamination and limitations of retrieval algorithms, the remote sensing products derived from single remote senor are suspected to the incompleteness, low accuracy and less consistency in space and time. Some land surface remote sensing products, such as soil moisture products derived from passive microwave remote sensing data have too coarse spatial resolution to be applied at local scale. Fusion and downscaling is an effective way of improving the quality of satellite remote sensing products.</p><p>We developed a Bayesian spatio-temporal geostatistics-based framework for multiple remote sensing products fusion and downscaling. Compared to the existing methods, the presented method has 2 major advantages. The first is that the method was developed in the Bayesian paradigm, so the uncertainties of the multiple remote sensing products being fused or downscaled could be quantified and explicitly expressed in the fusion and downscaling algorithms. The second advantage is that the spatio-temporal autocorrelation is exploited in the fusion approach so that more complete products could be produced by geostatistical estimation.</p><p>This method has been applied to the fusion of multiple satellite AOD products, multiple satellite SST products, multiple satellite LST products and downscaling of 25 km spatial resolution soil moisture products. The results were evaluated in both spatio-temporal completeness and accuracy.</p>


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