Spatial Downscaling of AMSR2 Soil Moisture Content using Soil Texture and Field Measurements

Abstract

Soil moisture content is generally accepted as an important factor to understand the process of crop growth and is the basis of earth system models for analysis and prediction of the crop condition. To continuously monitor soil moisture changes at kilometer scale, it is demanded to create high resolution data from the current, several tens of kilometers. In this paper we described a downscaling method for Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2) Soil Moisture Content (SMC) from 10 km to 30 m resolution using a soil texture and field measurements that have a high correlation with the SMC. As a result, the soil moisture variations of both data (before and after downscaling) were identical, and the Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of SMC exhibited the low values. Also, time series analyses showed that three kinds of SMC data (field measurement, original AMSR2, and downscaled AMSR2) had very similar temporal variations. Our method can be applied to downscaling of other soil variables and can contribute to monitoring small-scale changes of soil moisture by providing high resolution data.