Applications of NOAA weather satellite data to the estimates of topographic height and retrieval of soil moisture in Ningxia

Abstract

Marked by high efficiency, multiple channels and low cost, meteorological satellites have the applications extending from the use only in a meteorological context to quite a few scopes of research and operation. This paper introduces the establishment of statistical models between altitudes of stations at different latitudes/longitudes and corresponding NOAA/AVHRR remote sensing data to obtain the terrain altitudes in Ningxia and its surroundings whereupon the heights of different parts of Ningxia are found, with the results applied to the retrieval of spring soil moisture, thereby leading to the construction of soil moisture retrieval models from satellite data and altitudes for real-time monitoring soil moisture. Results show that it is successful to make verification of satellite-data calculated altitudes against measurements, which, when introduced into the soil moisture retrieval models, improve the accuracy to greater extent. On this basis we developed the operational models for remote sensing based spring soil moisture monitoring in the target region that are run in an easy, quick and visual way, thus providing an efficient means of farmland soil moisture/dryness distributions monitoring.