scholarly journals Challenges in flood modeling over data-scarce regions: how to exploit globally available soil moisture products to estimate antecedent soil wetness conditions in Morocco

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (10) ◽  
pp. 2591-2607
Author(s):  
El Mahdi El Khalki ◽  
Yves Tramblay ◽  
Christian Massari ◽  
Luca Brocca ◽  
Vincent Simonneaux ◽  
...  

Abstract. The Mediterranean region is characterized by intense rainfall events giving rise to devastating floods. In Maghreb countries such as Morocco, there is a strong need for forecasting systems to reduce the impacts of floods. The development of such a system in the case of ungauged catchments is complicated, but remote-sensing products could overcome the lack of in situ measurements. The soil moisture content can strongly modulate the magnitude of flood events and consequently is a crucial parameter to take into account for flood modeling. In this study, different soil moisture products (European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative, ESA-CCI; Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity, SMOS; Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity by the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique and Centre d'Etudes Spatiales de la Biosphère, SMOS-IC; Advanced Scatterometer, ASCAT; and ERA5 reanalysis) are compared to in situ measurements and one continuous soil-moisture-accounting (SMA) model for basins located in the High Atlas Mountains, upstream of the city of Marrakech. The results show that the SMOS-IC satellite product and the ERA5 reanalysis are best correlated with observed soil moisture and with the SMA model outputs. The different soil moisture datasets were also compared to estimate the initial soil moisture condition for an event-based hydrological model based on the Soil Conservation Service curve number (SCS-CN). The ASCAT, SMOS-IC, and ERA5 products performed equally well in validation to simulate floods, outperforming daily in situ soil moisture measurements that may not be representative of the whole catchment soil moisture conditions. The results also indicated that the daily time step may not fully represent the saturation state before a flood event due to the rapid decay of soil moisture after rainfall in these semiarid environments. Indeed, at the hourly time step, ERA5 and in situ measurements were found to better represent the initial soil moisture conditions of the SCS-CN model by comparison with the daily time step. The results of this work could be used to implement efficient flood modeling and forecasting systems in semiarid regions where soil moisture measurements are lacking.

Author(s):  
El Mahdi El Khalki ◽  
Yves Tramblay ◽  
Christian Massari ◽  
Luca Brocca ◽  
Mohamed El Mehdi Saidi

Abstract. The Mediterranean region is characterized by intense rainfall events giving rise to devastating floods. In Maghreb countries such as Morocco, there is a strong need for forecasting systems to reduce the impacts of floods. The development of such a system in the case of ungauged catchments is complicated but remote sensing products could overcome the lack of in-situ measurements. The soil moisture content can strongly modulate the magnitude of flood events and consequently is a crucial parameter to take into account for flood modeling. In this study, different soil moisture products (ESA-CCI, SMOS, SMOS-IC, ASCAT satellite products and ERA5 reanalysis) are compared to in-situ measurements and one continuous soil moisture accounting (SMA) model for basins located in the High-Atlas Mountains, upstream of the city of Marrakech. The results show that the SMOS-IC satellite product and the ERA5 reanalysis are best correlated with observed soil moisture and with the SMA model outputs. The different soil moisture datasets were also compared to estimate the initial soil moisture condition for an event-based hydrological model based on the Soil Conservation Service Curve Number (SCS-CN). The ASCAT, SMOS-IC and ERA5 products performed equally well in validation to simulate floods, outperforming daily in situ soil moisture measurements that may not be representative of the whole catchment soil moisture conditions. The results also indicated that the daily time step may not fully represent the saturation state before a flood event, due to the rapid decay of soil moisture after rainfall in these semi-arid environments. Indeed, at the hourly time step, ERA5 and in-situ measurements were found to better represent the initial soil moisture conditions of the SCS-CN model by comparison with the daily time step. The results of this work could be used to implement efficient flood modelling and forecasting systems in semi-arid regions where soil moisture measurements are lacking.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sisi Qin

<p>In this study, Sea Surface Salinity (SSS) Level 3 (L3) daily product derived from Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) during the year 2016, was validated and compared with SSS daily products derived from Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) and in-situ measurements. Generally, the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of the daily SSS products is larger along the coastal areas and at high latitudes and is smaller in the tropical regions and open oceans. Comparisons between the two types of daily satellite SSS product revealed that the RMSE was higher in the daily SMOS product than in the SMAP, whereas the bias of the daily SMOS was observed to be less than that of the SMAP when compared with Argo floats data. In addition, the latitude-dependent bias and RMSE of the SMAP SSS were found to be primarily influenced by the precipitation and the Sea Surface Temperature (SST).Then, aregression analysis method which has adopted the precipitation and SST data was used to correct the larger bias of the daily SMAP product. It was confirmed that the corrected daily SMAP product could be used for assimilation in high-resolution forecast models, due to the fact that it was demonstrated to be unbiased and much closer to the in-situ measurements than the original uncorrected SMAP product.</p>


10.29007/19gn ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diego Cézar Dos Santos Araújo ◽  
Suzana Maria Gico Lima Montenegro ◽  
Ana Cláudia Villar E Luna Gusmão ◽  
Diogo Francisco Borba Rodrigues

Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) data validation has been widely performed worldwide since the product became available. However, there are few studies for Brazil. This study focused on the validation of a new version of SMOS product developed by the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA) and Center d'Etudes Spatiales de la BIOsphère (CESBIO). One of the advantages of SMOS- INRA-CESBIO (SMOS-IC) is that the product is as independent as possible from auxiliary data. The validation was performed at 7 stations located in a semi-arid mesoregion of Pernambuco State, Northeast Brazil, for the year 2016. Bias, root mean square difference (RMSD), unbiased RMSD and the Pearson correlation coefficient (R) were computed between the SMOS-IC data and in situ measurements, considering only the ascending orbit (6 am local time). The results were consistent with those found in several studies, including error metrics. The correlation coefficient (r) ranged from 0.53 to 0.86 (mean 0.68) and the sensor was able to respond adequately to rainfall events. The results of this study are useful to demonstrate the need to continue validating soil moisture data obtained by remote sensors throughout the state, especially in more rainy locations.


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.


2010 ◽  
Vol 25 (10) ◽  
pp. 1542-1557 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashraf El-Sadek ◽  
Max Bleiweiss ◽  
Manoj Shukla ◽  
Steve Guldan ◽  
Alexander Fernald

2015 ◽  
pp. 55
Author(s):  
R. Fernandez Moran ◽  
J. P. Wigneron ◽  
E. Lopez-Baeza ◽  
M. Miernecki ◽  
P. Salgado-Hernanz ◽  
...  

La misión de SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity) se lanzó el 2 de Noviembre de 2009 con el objetivo de proporcionar datos de humedad del suelo y salinidad del mar. La principal actividad de la conocida como Valencia Anchor Station (VAS) es asistir en la validación a largo plazo de productos de suelo de SMOS. El presente estudio se centra en una validación de datos de nivel 3 de SMOS en la VAS con medidas in situ tomadas en el periodo 2010-2012. El radiómetro Elbara-II está situado dentro de los confines de la VAS, observando un campo de viñedos que se considera representativo de una gran proporción de un área de 50×50 km, suficiente para cubrir un footprint de SMOS. Las temperaturas de brillo (TB) adquiridas por ELBARA-II se compararon con las observadas por SMOS en las mismas fechas y horas. También se utilizó la inversión del modelo L-MEB con el fin de obtener humedades de suelo (SM) que, posteriormente, se compararon con datos de nivel 3 de SMOS. Se ha encontrado una buena correlación entre ambas series de TB, con mejoras año tras año, achacable fundamentalmente a la disminución de precipitaciones en el periodo objeto de estudio y a la mitigación de las interferencias por radiofrecuencia en banda L. La mayor homogeneidad del footprint del radiómetro ELBARA-II frente al de SMOS explica la mayor variabilidad de sus TB. Los periodos de precipitación más intensa (primavera y otoño) también son de mayor SM, lo que corrobora la consistencia de los resultados de SM simulados a través de las observaciones del radiómetro. Sin embargo, se debe resaltar una subestimación por parte de SMOS de los valores de SM respecto a los obtenidos por ELBARA-II, presumiblemente debido a la influencia que la pequeña fracción de suelo no destinado al cultivo de la vid tiene sobre SMOS. Las estimaciones por parte de SMOS en órbita descendente (6 p.m.) resultaron de mayor calidad (mayor correlación y menores RMSE y bias) que en órbita ascendente (6 a.m., momento de mayor humedad de suelo).


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Pasik ◽  
Wolfgang Preimesberger ◽  
Bernhard Bauer-Marschallinger ◽  
Wouter Dorigo

<p>Multiple satellite-based global surface soil moisture (SSM) datasets are presently available, these however, address exclusively the top layer of the soil (0-5cm). Meanwhile, root-zone soil moisture cannot be directly quantified with remote sensing but can be estimated from SSM using a land surface model. Alternatively, soil water index (SWI; calculated from SSM as a function of time needed for infiltration) can be used as a simple approximation of root-zone conditions. SWI is a proxy for deeper layers of the soil profile which control evapotranspiration, and is hence especially important for studying hydrological processes over vegetation-covered areas and meteorological modelling.</p><p>Here we introduce the advances in our work on the first operationally capable SWI-based root-zone soil moisture dataset from C3S Soil Moisture v201912 COMBINED product, spanning the period 2002-2020. The uniqueness of this dataset lies in the fact that T-values (temporal lengths ruling the infiltration) characteristic of SWI were translated into particular soil depths making it much more intuitive, user-friendly and easily applicable. Available are volumetric soil moisture values for the top 1 m of the soil profile at 10 cm intervals, where the optimal T-value (T-best) for each soil layer is selected based on a range of correlation metrics with in situ measurements from the International Soil Moisture Network (ISMN) and the relevant soil and climatic parameters.<br>Additionally we present the results of an extensive global validation against in situ measurements (ISMN) as well as the results of investigations into the relationship between a range of soil and climate characteristics and the optimal T-values for particular soil depths.</p>


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