1-km soil moisture retrieval using multi-temporal dual-channel SAR data from Sentinel-1 A/B satellites in a semi-arid watershed

Abstract

Soil moisture is an important variable in agricultural and hydrological applications. Sentinel-1 (A/B) satellite provides high-resolution (∼10 m) synthetic aperture radar data, and its high revisit capability (6 days at the equator) with multi-track data provides great potential for global soil moisture monitoring. In this study, an algorithm was proposed for soil moisture retrieval using the Multi-Temporal Dual-Channel (MTDC) Sentinel-1 data. The MTDC algorithm first conducted an incidence angle normalization method based on time series data to normalize backscattering coefficients from multiple tracks. Subsequently, using the vegetation water content obtained through a vegetation index climatology, soil roughness and soil unfrozen water content could be estimated for the freezing period (unfrozen water content in the soil is assumed to be stable for January and December). The changes in total backscatter between successive observations were expressed as a function of the two-way vegetation transmissivity multiplied by the difference between soil backscatter, which was directly related to the changes in soil moisture. Considering the retrieved soil roughness as a constant for the entire year, and the average unfrozen water content as the initial soil moisture, the changes in and absolute values of soil moisture for each observation can be estimated by minimizing a cost function between the modeled and observed changes in total backscatter. Retrieval results were validated against the soil moisture network in a semi-arid watershed of Shandian River with an unbiased Root Mean Square Error (ubRMSE) of 0.06 cm3·cm−3, and a bias of −0.04 cm3·cm−3. With the initial soil moisture from in-situ measurements, a higher accuracy was achieved for the MTDC algorithm (ubRMSE = 0.06 cm3·cm−3; bias = −0.01 cm3·cm−3). Further, comparisons with Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) enhanced products further verified the efficacy of the proposed algorithm (ubRMSE = 0.03 cm3·cm−3; bias = −0.004 cm3·cm−3), and demonstrated the feasibility of operational soil moisture products using the Sentinel-1 radar dataset.