Development of a deep learning-based method for estimating surface soil moisture at high spatial resolution from Sentinel-1 satellite data

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicklas Simonsen ◽  
Zheng Duan
Keyword(s):  
Remote Sensing ◽  
Soil Moisture ◽  
Deep Learning ◽  
High Resolution ◽  
Moisture Content ◽  
Spatial Resolution ◽  
Soil Moisture Content ◽  
Surface Soil ◽  
Surface Soil Moisture

<p>Soil moisture content is an important hydrological and climatic variable with applications in a wide range of domains. The high spatial variability of soil moisture cannot be well captured from conventional point-based in-situ measurements. Remote sensing offers a feasible way to observe spatial pattern of soil moisture from regional to global scales. Microwave remote sensing has long been used to estimate Surface Soil Moisture Content (SSMC) at lower spatial resolutions (>1km), but few accurate options exist in the higher spatial resolution (<1km) domain. This study explores the capabilities of deep learning in the high-resolution domain of remotely sensed SSMC by using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to estimate SSMC from Sentinel-1 acquired Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) imagery. The developed model incorporates additional SSMC predictors such as Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), temperature, precipitation, and soil type to yield a more accurate estimation than traditional empirical formulas that focus solely on the conversion of backscatter signals to relative soil moisture. This also makes the developed model less sensitive to site-specific conditions and increases the model applicability outside the training domain. The model is developed and tested with in-situ soil moisture measurements in Denmark from a dense network maintained by HOBE (Danish Hydrological Observatory). The unique advantage of the developed model is its transferability across climate zones, which has been historically absent in many prior models. This would open up opportunities for high-resolution soil moisture mapping through remote sensing in areas with relatively few soil moisture gauges. A reliable high-resolution soil moisture platform at good temporal resolution would allow for more precise erosion modelling, flood forecasting, drought monitoring, and precision agriculture.</p>

scholarly journals ADVANCES IN SOIL MOISTURE RETRIEVAL FROM NEAR-SURFACE MEASUREMENTS USING SATELLITE REMOTE SENSING

2018 ◽  
Vol XLII-5 ◽  
pp. 861-869
Author(s):  
R. Prajapati ◽  
D. Chakraborty ◽  
V. Kumar
Keyword(s):  
Remote Sensing ◽  
Soil Moisture ◽  
Moisture Content ◽  
Spatial Resolution ◽  
Satellite Remote Sensing ◽  
Soil Moisture Content ◽  
Surface Soil ◽  
Surface Soil Moisture ◽  
Generate Surface ◽  
Fine Resolution

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> Soil moisture influences numerous environmental processes occurring over large spatial and temporal scales. It profoundly influences the hydrological and meteorological activity together with climate predictions and hazard analysis. Space-borne sensors are capable of retrieving the surface soil moisture over a region on a regular basis. Latent heat measurements of soil, reflectance based methods, microwave measurements and synergistic approaches are some of the techniques used since long for providing soil moisture estimates over regional and global scales. Due to the dynamic interaction of soil with crops, retrieval of surface soil moisture is always challenging. This paper gives a brief overview of advance in soil moisture retrieval techniques, and an attempt to generate surface soil moisture from fine-resolution satellite remote sensing data. The optical remote sensing explores the linear relationship between land surface reflectance and soil moisture content, and through development of empirical spectral vegetation indices. Another way to estimate soil moisture emerged by measuring amplitude of diurnal temperature, which is closely related to thermal conductivity and heat capacity of soil. Emergence of radiometric satellite measurements at fine resolution has reached at a higher level of technology these days. Microwave remote sensing techniques have a long legacy of providing surface soil moisture estimates with reasonable accuracy. The SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity) and SMAP (Soil Moisture Passive and Active) missions launched in 2009 and 2015 respectively, are completely dedicated for providing soil moisture at global scale with a spatial resolution of 35<span class="thinspace"></span>km &amp; 3&amp;ndash;40<span class="thinspace"></span>km. These soil moisture products, however, provides data at highly coarser spatial resolution. The launch of Sentinels gave insight by providing active radar and optical data at higher resolution (&amp;sim;10<span class="thinspace"></span>m). Sentinel-1 is the first SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) constellation having 6-day revisit time providing data in C-band with dual polarisations. However, no algorithm or methodology is available to generate surface soil moisture product at a finer resolution from dual polarisations. Sentinel-1 data has been used to generate regional surface soil moisture image through modelling. The same has been also used for generating surface soil moisture map of IARI farm at New Delhi. Dubois, a bare surface model, was tested for its suitability for surface soil moisture retrieval of the farm. In addition, radar- based Soil moisture (SM) proxy method was used over Sentinel-1 data for the month of July 2018, and validated through actual surface soil moisture (gravimetric) measurements. Results were satisfactory for a range of 4&amp;ndash;16<span class="thinspace"></span>m<sup>3</sup><span class="thinspace"></span>m<sup>&amp;minus;3</sup> of soil moisture, with coefficient of determination (R<sup>2</sup>) as 0.45, RMSE of 2.35 and a p-value of 0.005. However, over a higher range of soil moisture (21&amp;ndash;33<span class="thinspace"></span>m<sup>3</sup><span class="thinspace"></span>m<sup>&amp;minus;3</sup>), which occurred after the rainfall, the R<sup>2</sup> value reduced to 0.22 with larger RMSE. Results suggested that SM-proxy approach might work well for a limited range (drier part) of soil moisture content, and not for the wet soil.</p>

scholarly journals New Downscaling Approach Using ESA CCI SM Products for Obtaining High Resolution Surface Soil Moisture

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (7) ◽  
pp. 1119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jovan Kovačević ◽  
Željko Cvijetinović ◽  
Nikola Stančić ◽  
Nenad Brodić ◽  
Dragan Mihajlović
Keyword(s):  
Soil Moisture ◽  
High Resolution ◽  
Random Forest ◽  
Spatial Resolution ◽  
Surface Soil ◽  
Initial Step ◽  
Surface Soil Moisture ◽  
In Situ Data ◽  
Random Forest Models

ESA CCI SM products have provided remotely-sensed surface soil moisture (SSM) content with the best spatial and temporal coverage thus far, although its output spatial resolution of 25 km is too coarse for many regional and local applications. The downscaling methodology presented in this paper improves ESA CCI SM spatial resolution to 1 km using two-step approach. The first step is used as a data engineering tool and its output is used as an input for the Random forest model in the second step. In addition to improvements in terms of spatial resolution, the approach also considers the problem of data gaps. The filling of these gaps is the initial step of the procedure, which in the end produces a continuous product in both temporal and spatial domains. The methodology uses combined active and passive ESA CCI SM products in addition to in situ soil moisture observations and the set of auxiliary downscaling predictors. The research tested several variants of Random forest models to determine the best combination of ESA CCI SM products. The conclusion is that synergic use of all ESA CCI SM products together with the auxiliary datasets in the downscaling procedure provides better results than using just one type of ESA CCI SM product alone. The methodology was applied for obtaining SSM maps for the area of California, USA during 2016. The accuracy of tested models was validated using five-fold cross-validation against in situ data and the best variation of model achieved RMSE, R2 and MAE of 0.0518 m3/m3, 0.7312 and 0.0374 m3/m3, respectively. The methodology proved to be useful for generating high-resolution SSM products, although additional improvements are necessary.

scholarly journals A Machine Learning-Based Approach for Surface Soil Moisture Estimations with Google Earth Engine

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (11) ◽  
pp. 2099
Author(s):  
Felix Greifeneder ◽  
Claudia Notarnicola ◽  
Wolfgang Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Soil Moisture ◽  
Moisture Content ◽  
Spatial Resolution ◽  
Soil Moisture Content ◽  
Surface Soil ◽  
High Spatial Resolution ◽  
Google Earth ◽  
Surface Soil Moisture ◽  
Google Earth Engine

Due to its relation to the Earth’s climate and weather and phenomena like drought, flooding, or landslides, knowledge of the soil moisture content is valuable to many scientific and professional users. Remote-sensing offers the unique possibility for continuous measurements of this variable. Especially for agriculture, there is a strong demand for high spatial resolution mapping. However, operationally available soil moisture products exist with medium to coarse spatial resolution only (≥1 km). This study introduces a machine learning (ML)—based approach for the high spatial resolution (50 m) mapping of soil moisture based on the integration of Landsat-8 optical and thermal images, Copernicus Sentinel-1 C-Band SAR images, and modelled data, executable in the Google Earth Engine. The novelty of this approach lies in applying an entirely data-driven ML concept for global estimation of the surface soil moisture content. Globally distributed in situ data from the International Soil Moisture Network acted as an input for model training. Based on the independent validation dataset, the resulting overall estimation accuracy, in terms of Root-Mean-Squared-Error and R², was 0.04 m3·m−3 and 0.81, respectively. Beyond the retrieval model itself, this article introduces a framework for collecting training data and a stand-alone Python package for soil moisture mapping. The Google Earth Engine Python API facilitates the execution of data collection and retrieval which is entirely cloud-based. For soil moisture retrieval, it eliminates the requirement to download or preprocess any input datasets.

scholarly journals C-band radar data and in situ measurements for the monitoring of wheat crops in a semi-arid area (center of Morocco)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nadia Ouaadi ◽  
Jamal Ezzahar ◽  
Saïd Khabba ◽  
Salah Er-Raki ◽  
Adnane Chakir ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Remote Sensing ◽  
Soil Moisture ◽  
High Resolution ◽  
Scientific Community ◽  
Surface Soil ◽  
Radar Data ◽  
Surface Soil Moisture ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Semi Arid

Abstract. A better understanding of the hydrological functioning of irrigated crops using remote sensing observations is of prime importance in the semi-arid areas where the water resources are limited. Radar observations, available at high resolution and revisit time since the launch of Sentinel-1 in 2014, have shown great potential for the monitoring of the water content of the upper soil and of the canopy. In this paper, a complete set of data for radar signal analysis is shared to the scientific community for the first time to our knowledge. The data set is composed of Sentinel-1 products and in situ measurements of soil and vegetation variables collected during three agricultural seasons over drip-irrigated winter wheat in the Haouz plain in Morocco. The in situ data gathers soil measurements (time series of half-hourly surface soil moisture, surface roughness and agricultural practices) and vegetation measurements collected every week/two weeks including above-ground fresh and dry biomasses, vegetation water content based on destructive measurements, cover fraction, leaf area index and plant height. Radar data are the backscattering coefficient and the interferometric coherence derived from Sentinel-1 GRDH (Ground Range Detected High resolution) and SLC (Single Look Complex) products, respectively. The normalized difference vegetation index derived from Sentinel-2 data based on Level-2A (surface reflectance and cloud mask) atmospheric effects-corrected products is also provided. This database, which is the first of its kind made available in open access, is described here comprehensively in order to help the scientific community to evaluate and to develop new or existing remote sensing algorithms for monitoring wheat canopy under semi-arid conditions. The data set is particularly relevant for the development of radar applications including surface soil moisture and vegetation parameters retrieval using either physically based or empirical approaches such as machine and deep learning algorithms. The database is archived in the DataSuds repository and is freely-accessible via the DOI: https://doi.org/10.23708/8D6WQC (Ouaadi et al., 2020a).

scholarly journals ESTIMATION OF SOIL MOISTURE AND EARTH’S SURFACE TEMPERATURE USING LANDSAT-8 SATELLITE DATA

2019 ◽  
Vol XLII-4/W18 ◽  
pp. 327-330
Author(s):  
M. Entezari ◽  
A. Esmaeily ◽  
S. Niazmardi
Keyword(s):  
Remote Sensing ◽  
Soil Moisture ◽  
Moisture Content ◽  
Surface Temperature ◽  
Soil Moisture Content ◽  
Surface Soil ◽  
Landsat 8 ◽  
Surface Soil Moisture ◽  
Surface Moisture ◽  
Moisture Estimation

Abstract. Soil moisture estimation is essential for optimal water and soil resources management. Surface soil moisture is an important variable in the natural water cycle, which plays an important role in the global equilibrium of water and energy due to its impact on hydrological, ecological and meteorological processes. Soil moisture changes due to the variability of soil characteristics, topography and vegetation in time and place. Soil moisture measurements are performed directly using in situ methods and indirect, by means of transfer functions or remote sensing. Since in-site measurements are usually costly and time-consuming in large areas, we can use methods such as remote sensing to estimate soil moisture at very large scales. The purpose of this study is to estimate soil moisture using surface temperature and vegetation indices for large areas. In this paper, ground temperature was calculated using Landsat-8 thermal band for Mashhad city and was used to estimate the soil moisture content of the study area. The results showed that urban areas had the highest temperature and less humidity at the time of imaging. For this purpose, using the LANDSAT 8 images, the indices were extracted and validated with soil moisture data. In this research, the study area was described and then, using the extracted indices, the estimated model was obtained. The results showed that there is a good correlation between surface soil moisture content with LST and NDVI indices (95%). The results of the verification of the soil moisture estimation model also showed that this model with a mean error of less than 0.001 can predict the surface moisture content, this small amount of error indicates the precision of the proposed model for estimating surface moisture.

scholarly journals C-band radar data and in situ measurements for the monitoring of wheat crops in a semi-arid area (center of Morocco)

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (7) ◽  
pp. 3707-3731
Author(s):  
Nadia Ouaadi ◽  
Jamal Ezzahar ◽  
Saïd Khabba ◽  
Salah Er-Raki ◽  
Adnane Chakir ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Remote Sensing ◽  
Soil Moisture ◽  
High Resolution ◽  
Scientific Community ◽  
Surface Soil ◽  
Radar Data ◽  
Surface Soil Moisture ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Semi Arid

Abstract. A better understanding of the hydrological functioning of irrigated crops using remote sensing observations is of prime importance in semi-arid areas where water resources are limited. Radar observations, available at high resolution and with a high revisit time since the launch of Sentinel-1 in 2014, have shown great potential for the monitoring of the water content of the upper soil and of the canopy. In this paper, a complete set of data for radar signal analysis is shared with the scientific community for the first time to our knowledge. The data set is composed of Sentinel-1 products and in situ measurements of soil and vegetation variables collected during three agricultural seasons over drip-irrigated winter wheat in the Haouz plain in Morocco. The in situ data gather soil measurements (time series of half-hourly surface soil moisture, surface roughness and agricultural practices) and vegetation measurements collected every week/2 weeks including aboveground fresh and dry biomasses, vegetation water content based on destructive measurements, the cover fraction, the leaf area index, and plant height. Radar data are the backscattering coefficient and the interferometric coherence derived from Sentinel-1 GRDH (Ground Range Detected High Resolution) and SLC (Single Look Complex) products, respectively. The normalized difference vegetation index derived from Sentinel-2 data based on Level-2A (surface reflectance and cloud mask) atmospheric-effects-corrected products is also provided. This database, which is the first of its kind made available open access, is described here comprehensively in order to help the scientific community to evaluate and to develop new or existing remote sensing algorithms for monitoring wheat canopy under semi-arid conditions. The data set is particularly relevant for the development of radar applications including surface soil moisture and vegetation variable retrieval using either physically based or empirical approaches such as machine and deep learning algorithms. The database is archived in the DataSuds repository and is freely accessible via the following DOI: https://doi.org/10.23708/8D6WQC (Ouaadi et al., 2020a).

Exploring the use of machine-learning techniques to integrate ground- and remote sensing-based observations for efficient near-surface soil moisture mapping

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Schönbrodt-Stitt ◽  
Paolo Nasta ◽  
Nima Ahmadian ◽  
Markus Kurtenbach ◽  
Christopher Conrad ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Soil Moisture ◽  
Spatial Resolution ◽  
Surface Soil ◽  
Bare Soil ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
Surface Soil Moisture ◽  
Near Surface ◽  
Campania Region

&lt;p&gt;Mapping near-surface soil moisture (&lt;em&gt;&amp;#952;&lt;/em&gt;) is of tremendous relevance for a broad range of environment-related disciplines and meteorological, ecological, hydrological and agricultural applications. Globally available products offer the opportunity to address &lt;em&gt;&amp;#952;&lt;/em&gt; in large-scale modelling with coarse spatial resolution such as at the landscape level. However, &lt;em&gt;&amp;#952;&lt;/em&gt; estimation at higher spatial resolution is of vital importance for many small-scale applications. Therefore, we focus our study on a small-scale catchment (MFC2) belonging to the &amp;#8220;Alento&amp;#8221; hydrological observatory, located in southern Italy (Campania Region). The goal of this study is to develop new machine-learning approaches to estimate high grid-resolution (about 17 m cell size) &lt;em&gt;&amp;#952;&lt;/em&gt; maps from mainly backscatter measurements retrieved from C-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) based on Sentinel-1 (S1) images and from gridded terrain attributes. Thus, a workflow comprising a total of 48 SAR-based &lt;em&gt;&amp;#952;&lt;/em&gt; patterns estimated for 24 satellite overpass dates (revisit time of 6 days) each with ascendant and descendent orbits will be presented. To enable for the mapping, SAR-based &lt;em&gt;&amp;#952;&lt;/em&gt; data was calibrated with in-situ measurements carried out with a portable device during eight measurement campaigns at time of satellite overpasses (four overpass days in total with each ascendant and descendent satellite overpasses per day in November 2018). After the calibration procedure, data validation was executed from November 10, 2018 till March 28, 2019 by using two stationary sensors monitoring &lt;em&gt;&amp;#952;&lt;/em&gt; at high-temporal (1-min recording time). The specific sensor locations reflected two contrasting field conditions, one bare soil plot (frequently kept clear, without disturbance of vegetation cover) and one non-bare soil plot (real-world condition). Point-scale ground observations of &lt;em&gt;&amp;#952;&lt;/em&gt; were compared to pixel-scale (17 m &amp;#215; 17 m), SAR-based &lt;em&gt;&amp;#952;&lt;/em&gt; estimated for those pixels corresponding to the specific positions of the stationary sensors. Mapping performance was estimated through the root mean squared error (RMSE). For a short-term time series of &lt;em&gt;&amp;#952;&lt;/em&gt; (Nov 2018) integrating 136 in situ, sensor-based &lt;em&gt;&amp;#952;&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;&amp;#952;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sub&gt;insitu&lt;/sub&gt;) and 74 gravimetric-based &lt;em&gt;&amp;#952;&lt;/em&gt; (&lt;em&gt;&amp;#952;&lt;/em&gt;&lt;sub&gt;gravimetric&lt;/sub&gt;) measurements during a total of eight S1 overpasses, mapping performance already proved to be satisfactory with RMSE=0.039 m&amp;#179;m&lt;sup&gt;-&lt;/sup&gt;&amp;#179; and R&amp;#178;=0.92, respectively with RMSE=0.041 m&amp;#179;m&lt;sup&gt;-&lt;/sup&gt;&amp;#179; and R&amp;#178;=0.91. First results further reveal that estimated satellite-based &lt;em&gt;&amp;#952;&lt;/em&gt; patterns respond to the evolution of rainfall. With our workflow developed and results, we intend to contribute to improved environmental risk assessment by assimilating the results into hydrological models (e.g., HydroGeoSphere), and to support future studies on combined ground-based and SAR-based &lt;em&gt;&amp;#952;&lt;/em&gt; retrieval for forested land (future missions operating at larger wavelengths e.g. NISARL-band, Biomass P-band sensors).&lt;/p&gt;

scholarly journals Modelling soil moisture at SMOS scale by use of a SVAT model over the Valencia Anchor Station

2010 ◽  
Vol 14 (5) ◽  
pp. 831-846 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Juglea ◽  
Y. Kerr ◽  
A. Mialon ◽  
J.-P. Wigneron ◽  
E. Lopez-Baeza ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Remote Sensing ◽  
Soil Moisture ◽  
Surface Soil ◽  
Temporal Distribution ◽  
Sea Surface Salinity ◽  
Surface Soil Moisture ◽  
Surface Salinity ◽  
Anchor Station ◽  
Svat Model

Abstract. The main goal of the SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity) mission is to deliver global fields of surface soil moisture and sea surface salinity using L-band (1.4 GHz) radiometry. Within the context of the Science preparation for SMOS, the Valencia Anchor Station (VAS) experimental site, in Spain, was chosen to be one of the main test sites in Europe for Calibration/Validation (Cal/Val) activities. In this framework, the paper presents an approach consisting in accurately simulating a whole SMOS pixel by representing the spatial and temporal heterogeneity of the soil moisture fields over the wide VAS surface (50×50 km2). Ground and meteorological measurements over the area are used as the input of a Soil-Vegetation-Atmosphere-Transfer (SVAT) model, SURFEX (Externalized Surface) - module ISBA (Interactions between Soil-Biosphere-Atmosphere) to simulate the spatial and temporal distribution of surface soil moisture. The calibration as well as the validation of the ISBA model are performed using in situ soil moisture measurements. It is shown that a good consistency is reached when point comparisons between simulated and in situ soil moisture measurements are made. Actually, an important challenge in remote sensing approaches concerns product validation. In order to obtain an representative soil moisture mapping over the Valencia Anchor Station (50×50 km2 area), a spatialization method is applied. For verification, a comparison between the simulated spatialized soil moisture and remote sensing data from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer on Earth observing System (AMSR-E) and from the European Remote Sensing Satellites (ERS-SCAT) is performed. Despite the fact that AMSR-E surface soil moisture product is not reproducing accurately the absolute values, it provides trustworthy information on surface soil moisture temporal variability. However, during the vegetation growing season the signal is perturbed. By using the polarization ratio a better agreement is obtained. ERS-SCAT soil moisture products are also used to be compared with the simulated spatialized soil moisture. However, the lack of soil moisture data from the ERS-SCAT sensor over the area (45 observations for one year) prevented capturing the soil moisture variability.

scholarly journals Soil Moisture Retrival Based on Sentinel-1 Imagery under Sparse Vegetation Coverage

Sensors ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 589 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shuai Huang ◽  
Jianli Ding ◽  
Jie Zou ◽  
Bohua Liu ◽  
Junyong Zhang ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Distribution ◽  
Soil Moisture ◽  
Moisture Content ◽  
Vegetation Cover ◽  
Soil Moisture Content ◽  
Surface Soil ◽  
Retrieval Model ◽  
Surface Soil Moisture ◽  
Microwave Scattering ◽  
Sparse Vegetation

Soil moisture is an important aspect of heat transfer process and energy exchange between land-atmosphere systems, and it is a key link to the surface and groundwater circulation and land carbon cycles. In this study, according to the characteristics of the study area, an advanced integral equation model was used for numerical simulation analysis to establish a database of surface microwave scattering characteristics under sparse vegetation cover. Thus, a soil moisture retrieval model suitable for arid area was constructed. The results were as follows: (1) The response of the backscattering coefficient to soil moisture and associated surface roughness is significantly and logarithmically correlated under different incidence angles and polarization modes, and, a database of microwave scattering characteristics of arid soil surface under sparse vegetation cover was established. (2) According to the Sentinel-1 radar system parameters, a model for retrieving spatial distribution information of soil moisture was constructed; the soil moisture content information was extracted, and the results were consistent with the spatial distribution characteristics of soil moisture in the same period in the research area. (3) For the 0–10 cm surface soil moisture, the correlation coefficient between the simulated value and the measured value reached 0.8488, which means that the developed retrieval model has applicability to derive surface soil moisture in the oasis region of arid regions. This study can provide method for real-time and large-scale detection of soil moisture content in arid areas.

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