scholarly journals DOWNSCALING OF SMAP SOIL MOISTURE PRODUCT BY DATA FUSION WITH VIIRS LST/EVI PRODUCT

Author(s):  
X. Lei ◽  
Y. Wang ◽  
T. Guo

Abstract. Soil moisture is an essential variable of environment and climate change, which affects the energy and water exchange between soil and atmosphere. The estimation of soil moisture is thus very important in geoscience, while at same time also challenging. Satellite remote sensing provides an efficient way for large-scale soil moisture distribution mapping, and microwave remote sensing satellites/sensors, such as Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS), Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR), and Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite, are widely used to retrieve soil moisture in a global scale. However, most microwave products have relatively coarse resolution (tens of kilometres), which limits their application in regional hydrological simulation and disaster prevention. In this study, the SMAP soil moisture product with spatial resolution of 9km is downscaled to 750m by fusing with VIIRS optical products. The LST-EVI triangular space pattern provides the physical foundation for the microwave-optical data fusion, so that the downscaled soil moisture product not only matches well with the original SMAP product, but also presents more detailed distribution patterns compared with the original dataset. The results show a promising prospect to use the triangular method to produce finer soil moisture datasets (within 1 km) from the coarse soil moisture product.

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
Yongzhe Chen ◽  
Xiaoming Feng ◽  
Bojie Fu

Abstract. Soil moisture is an important variable linking the atmosphere and terrestrial ecosystems. However, long-term satellite monitoring of surface soil moisture at the global scale needs improvement. In this study, we conducted data calibration and data fusion of 11 well-acknowledged microwave remote-sensing soil moisture products since 2003 through a neural network approach, with Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) soil moisture data applied as the primary training target. The training efficiency was high (R2=0.95) due to the selection of nine quality impact factors of microwave soil moisture products and the complicated organizational structure of multiple neural networks (five rounds of iterative simulations, eight substeps, 67 independent neural networks, and more than 1 million localized subnetworks). Then, we developed the global remote-sensing-based surface soil moisture dataset (RSSSM) covering 2003–2018 at 0.1∘ resolution. The temporal resolution is approximately 10 d, meaning that three data records are obtained within a month, for days 1–10, 11–20, and from the 21st to the last day of that month. RSSSM is proven comparable to the in situ surface soil moisture measurements of the International Soil Moisture Network sites (overall R2 and RMSE values of 0.42 and 0.087 m3 m−3), while the overall R2 and RMSE values for the existing popular similar products are usually within the ranges of 0.31–0.41 and 0.095–0.142 m3 m−3), respectively. RSSSM generally presents advantages over other products in arid and relatively cold areas, which is probably because of the difficulty in simulating the impacts of thawing and transient precipitation on soil moisture, and during the growing seasons. Moreover, the persistent high quality during 2003–2018 as well as the complete spatial coverage ensure the applicability of RSSSM to studies on both the spatial and temporal patterns (e.g. long-term trend). RSSSM data suggest an increase in the global mean surface soil moisture. Moreover, without considering the deserts and rainforests, the surface soil moisture loss on consecutive rainless days is highest in summer over the low latitudes (30∘ S–30∘ N) but mostly in winter over the mid-latitudes (30–60∘ N, 30–60∘ S). Notably, the error propagation is well controlled with the extension of the simulation period to the past, indicating that the data fusion algorithm proposed here will be more meaningful in the future when more advanced microwave sensors become operational. RSSSM data can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.912597 (Chen, 2020).


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 228
Author(s):  
Jian Kang ◽  
Rui Jin ◽  
Xin Li ◽  
Yang Zhang

In recent decades, microwave remote sensing (RS) has been used to measure soil moisture (SM). Long-term and large-scale RS SM datasets derived from various microwave sensors have been used in environmental fields. Understanding the accuracies of RS SM products is essential for their proper applications. However, due to the mismatched spatial scale between the ground-based and RS observations, the truth at the pixel scale may not be accurately represented by ground-based observations, especially when the spatial density of in situ measurements is low. Because ground-based observations are often sparsely distributed, temporal upscaling was adopted to transform a few in situ measurements into SM values at a pixel scale of 1 km by introducing the temperature vegetation dryness index (TVDI) related to SM. The upscaled SM showed high consistency with in situ SM observations and could accurately capture rainfall events. The upscaled SM was considered as the reference data to evaluate RS SM products at different spatial scales. In regard to the validation results, in addition to the correlation coefficient (R) of the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) SM being slightly lower than that of the Climate Change Initiative (CCI) SM, SMAP had the best performance in terms of the root-mean-square error (RMSE), unbiased RMSE and bias, followed by the CCI. The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) products were in worse agreement with the upscaled SM and were inferior to the R value of the X-band SM of the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2). In conclusion, in the study area, the SMAP and CCI SM are more reliable, although both products were underestimated by 0.060 cm3 cm−3 and 0.077 cm3 cm−3, respectively. If the biases are corrected, then the improved SMAP with an RMSE of 0.043 cm3 cm−3 and the CCI with an RMSE of 0.039 cm3 cm−3 will hopefully reach the application requirement for an accuracy with an RMSE less than 0.040 cm3 cm−3.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 384
Author(s):  
Javier Martínez-López ◽  
Bastian Bertzky ◽  
Simon Willcock ◽  
Marine Robuchon ◽  
María Almagro ◽  
...  

Protected areas (PAs) are a key strategy to reverse global biodiversity declines, but they are under increasing pressure from anthropogenic activities and concomitant effects. Thus, the heterogeneous landscapes within PAs, containing a number of different habitats and ecosystem types, are in various degrees of disturbance. Characterizing habitats and ecosystems within the global protected area network requires large-scale monitoring over long time scales. This study reviews methods for the biophysical characterization of terrestrial PAs at a global scale by means of remote sensing (RS) and provides further recommendations. To this end, we first discuss the importance of taking into account the structural and functional attributes, as well as integrating a broad spectrum of variables, to account for the different ecosystem and habitat types within PAs, considering examples at local and regional scales. We then discuss potential variables, challenges and limitations of existing global environmental stratifications, as well as the biophysical characterization of PAs, and finally offer some recommendations. Computational and interoperability issues are also discussed, as well as the potential of cloud-based platforms linked to earth observations to support large-scale characterization of PAs. Using RS to characterize PAs globally is a crucial approach to help ensure sustainable development, but it requires further work before such studies are able to inform large-scale conservation actions. This study proposes 14 recommendations in order to improve existing initiatives to biophysically characterize PAs at a global scale.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 1666-1678
Author(s):  
Mohammed H. Aljahdali ◽  
Mohamed Elhag

AbstractRabigh is a thriving coastal city located at the eastern bank of the Red Sea, Saudi Arabia. The city has suffered from shoreline destruction because of the invasive tidal action powered principally by the wind speed and direction over shallow waters. This study was carried out to calibrate the water column depth in the vicinity of Rabigh. Optical and microwave remote sensing data from the European Space Agency were collected over 2 years (2017–2018) along with the analog daily monitoring of tidal data collected from the marine station of Rabigh. Depth invariant index (DII) was implemented utilizing the optical data, while the Wind Field Estimation algorithm was implemented utilizing the microwave data. The findings of the current research emphasis on the oscillation behavior of the depth invariant mean values and the mean astronomical tides resulted in R2 of 0.75 and 0.79, respectively. Robust linear regression was established between the astronomical tide and the mean values of the normalized DII (R2 = 0.81). The findings also indicated that January had the strongest wind speed solidly correlated with the depth invariant values (R2 = 0.92). Therefore, decision-makers can depend on remote sensing data as an efficient tool to monitor natural phenomena and also to regulate human activities in fragile ecosystems.


2021 ◽  
Vol 100 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-41
Author(s):  
A.A. Volchek ◽  
◽  
D.O. Petrov ◽  

A review of modern tools of global monitoring of soil moisture by means of remote sensing of the Earth’s surface is presented. The characteristic features of the use of orbital radiometers and radars of C, X and L microwave bands for estimating the volumetric soil moisture at a depth of 5 cm and the root layer of vegetation are considered. A review of the capabilities of satellite gravimetry to assess the land water equivalent thickness is made. A number of sources have been proposed for obtaining estimates of soil water content from satellite based radiometric devices and orbital gravimetric systems. Based on the analysis of scientific research papers, the complexity of monitoring the level of fire danger indices in forests is shown, and the prospects of assessing soil moisture in agricultural regions using microwave orbital instruments are demonstrated, and the adequacy of calculating the moisture content in soil at a depth of up to one meter using satellite gravimetry is described.


2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 1849-1862 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wade T. Crow ◽  
Eunjin Han ◽  
Dongryeol Ryu ◽  
Christopher R. Hain ◽  
Martha C. Anderson

Abstract. Due to their shallow vertical support, remotely sensed surface soil moisture retrievals are commonly regarded as being of limited value for water budget applications requiring the characterization of temporal variations in total terrestrial water storage (dS ∕ dt). However, advances in our ability to estimate evapotranspiration remotely now allow for the direct evaluation of approaches for quantifying dS ∕ dt via water budget closure considerations. By applying an annual water budget analysis within a series of medium-scale (2000–10 000 km2) basins within the United States, we demonstrate that, despite their clear theoretical limitations, surface soil moisture retrievals derived from passive microwave remote sensing contain statistically significant information concerning dS ∕ dt. This suggests the possibility of using (relatively) higher-resolution microwave remote sensing products to enhance the spatial resolution of dS ∕ dt estimates acquired from gravity remote sensing.


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