Evaluating ESA CCI soil moisture in East Africa

Abstract

To assess growing season conditions where ground based observations are limited or unavailable, food security and agricultural drought monitoring analysts rely on publicly available remotely sensed rainfall and vegetation greenness. There are also remotely sensed soil moisture observations from missions like the European Space Agency (ESA), Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) and NASA’s Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP); however, these time series are still too short to conduct studies that demonstrate the utility of these data for operational applications, or to provide historical context for extreme wet or dry events.To promote the use of remotely sensed soil moisture in agricultural drought and food security monitoring, we evaluate the quality of a 30+ year time series of merged active–passive microwave soil moisture from the ESA Climate Change Initiative (CCI-SM) over East Africa. Compared to the Normalized Difference Vegetation index (NDVI) and modeled soil moisture products, we find substantial spatial and temporal gaps in the early part of the CCI-SM record, with adequate data coverage beginning in 1992. From this point forward, growing season CCI-SM anomalies are well correlated (R>0.5) with modeled soil moisture, and in some regions, NDVI. We use pixel-wise correlation analysis and qualitative comparisons of seasonal maps and time series to show that remotely sensed soil moisture can inform remote drought monitoring that has traditionally relied on rainfall and NDVI in moderately vegetated regions.