Soil Moisture Estimation from Chinese Fengyun Satellite Data

Abstract

Soil moisture (SM) is a crucial variable in many domains including climate, agriculture and hydrology. In the past decades, satellite-derived land surface temperature (LST) and fractional vegetation cover (FVC) has been widely used to estimate SM at various spatial scales. In the present study, the Chinese Feng Yun (FY) satellites (FY-4A and FY-3D) were first used to estimate SM over the mainland China, following a pixel-to-pixel scheme of the LST-FVC trapezoid method. The soil moisture active passive (SMAP) product was conducted to assess the estimated SM over the study area. Results indicated that a root mean square error of approximately 0.108 m <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">3</sup> m <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">−3</sup> can be found between the FY-derived SM and SMAP product.