Soil Moisture Retrieval Algorithm Research Articles

Development of surface roughness and soil moisture retrieval algorithm using passive microwave remote sensing data

Development of surface roughness and soil moisture retrieval algorithm using passive microwave remote sensing data

An Improved Method of Soil Moisture Retrieval Using Multi-Frequency SNR Data

Soil moisture monitoring using Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) multipath signals has gained continuous interests in recent years. However, traditional GNSS-interferometric reflectometry (GNSS-IR) soil moisture retrieval methods generally utilize a single frequency or single satellite, which fail to take full advantage of different and complementary of satellite signals with different frequencies. An improved algorithm for soil moisture retrieval based on principal component analysis (PCA) and entropy method using multi-frequency amplitude and phase offset fusion data was proposed in this research. The performance of the proposed soil moisture retrieval method was evaluated using data recorded by Plate Boundary Observatory (PBO) H2O networks and a self-built site in Henan, China. The results from GPS and BeiDou both showed that the retrieved soil moisture has a stronger correlation with in situ soil moisture, which can better reflect the fluctuation of ground truth measurements. Compared with the traditional method, the retrieval accuracy of the proposed method in terms of root-mean-square error (RMSE) was improved by 50.93%, and the average correlation coefficient were increased by 11.71%. This research proved that the proposed method could effectively improve retrieval accuracy due to the increasing number of frequencies and tracks clustering. Moreover, this study has illustrated the feasibility of BeiDou signals to precisely estimate surface soil moisture.

Evaluation of six satellite- and model-based surface soil temperature datasets using global ground-based observations

The comprehensive evaluation of model- and satellite-based surface soil temperature (ST) products is a prerequisite for applications of these datasets in hydrology, ecology, and climate change, as well as in passive microwave soil moisture retrieval algorithms. Distinguished from existing regional validations, this study used ground soil temperature observations of approximately 800 stations from 5 sparse and 15 dense networks worldwide to fully assess six model- and satellite-based surface ST products from April 2015 to December 2017. The products consist of five model-based ST from the Modern-Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications, version 2 (MERRA-2), the Goddard Earth Observing System Model version 5 Forward Processing (GEOS-5 FP), the Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS) Noah, the ERA-Interim and the newly released ERA5 produced by the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), and one satellite-based ST retrieved from the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2) by using the Land Parameter Retrieval Model (LPRM). The accuracy of these products was comprehensively assessed per availability of ground networks, soil temperature interval, soil moisture interval, land cover, climate zone, and elevation. The results show that the GEOS-5 exhibits the smallest averaged unbiased root mean square difference (ubRMSD) of 1.84 K among all the surface ST products. All model-based products show a high skill in capturing the temporal trend of ground observations with an averaged correlation coefficient larger than 0.97. The ERA5 surface ST obtains visible improvements compared to its predecessor ERA-Interim by showing smaller ubRMSD and absolute bias values. All model-based surface ST products generally show lower values than ground ST, while their bias tends to be warmer as soil temperature and soil moisture increase except for the highest temperature and moisture conditions. Moreover, unstable performance of most model-based products in shrubland and grassland, tropical, arid and cold climate, and high elevation regions is also demonstrated by larger ubRMSD values. The averaged ubRMSD of the satellite-based LPRM ST is 3.04 K, and more attentions should be paid to the impacts of elevations and underlying surfaces on improving this product. These new findings will be valuable for future refinement of ST datasets, algorithms used to estimate soil moisture from satellite data, and applications in various disciplines.

Comparison of soil dielectric mixing models for soil moisture retrieval using SMAP brightness temperature over croplands in India

The accurate estimation of soil moisture (SM) using microwave remote sensing depends mostly on careful selection of retrieval parameters among which the soil dielectric mixing model is the important one. These models are often categorized into empirical, semi-empirical or volumetric based on their methodologies and input data requirements. To study in detail, the comparative performance of four dielectric mixing models -- Wang & Schmugge model, Hallikainen model, Dobson model and Mironov model were used with Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) L-band brightness temperature and Single Channel Algorithm for SM retrieval over agricultural landscapes in India. The highest performance statistics combination in terms of Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), correlation coefficient (R2) and percentage bias (PBIAS) against the concurrent in-situ SM measurements were calculated at the selected validation sites. The overall results indicate that the best performance was given by the Mironov model (RMSE = 0.07 m3/m3), followed by Wang & Schmugge model (RMSE = 0.08 m3/m3), Hallikainen model (RMSE = 0.09 m3/m3), Dobson model (RMSE = 0.10 m3/m3) and original SMAP radiometer SM (RMSE = 0.12 m3/m3). Findings of this study provides important insights into application and performance of dielectric mixing models in mapping surface SM variations. This study also underlines the pivotal role of local conditions for SM retrieval which should be carefully included in the algorithms.

Generating seamless global daily AMSR2 soil moisture (SGD-SM) long-term products for the years 2013–2019

Abstract. High-quality and long-term soil moisture products are significant for hydrologic monitoring and agricultural management. However, the acquired daily Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2) soil moisture products are incomplete in global land (just about 30 %–80 % coverage ratio), due to the satellite orbit coverage and the limitations of soil moisture retrieval algorithms. To solve this inevitable problem, we develop a novel spatio-temporal partial convolutional neural network (CNN) for AMSR2 soil moisture product gap-filling. Through the proposed framework, we generate the seamless daily global (SGD) AMSR2 long-term soil moisture products from 2013 to 2019. To further validate the effectiveness of these products, three verification methods are used as follows: (1) in situ validation, (2) time-series validation, and (3) simulated missing-region validation. Results show that the seamless global daily soil moisture products have reliable cooperativity with the selected in situ values. The evaluation indexes of the reconstructed (original) dataset are a correlation coefficient (R) of 0.685 (0.689), root-mean-squared error (RMSE) of 0.097 (0.093), and mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.079 (0.077). The temporal consistency of the reconstructed daily soil moisture products is ensured with the original time-series distribution of valid values. The spatial continuity of the reconstructed regions is in accordance with the spatial information (R: 0.963–0.974, RMSE: 0.065–0.073, and MAE: 0.044–0.052). This dataset can be downloaded at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4417458 (Zhang et al., 2021).

Soil Moisture Retrieval From Sentinel-1 Time-Series Data Over Croplands of Northeastern Thailand

In this letter, we propose a dual-temporal dual-channel (DTDC) algorithm for soil moisture retrieval by using time-series observations from the Sentinel-1 C-band synthetic aperture radar. This algorithm utilizes the ancillary information of vegetation water content derived from optical images and assumes no variation on the surface roughness during the two consecutive radar measurements. Therefore, with the DTDC backscatter observations, four equations could be established using forward models, while three unknowns (the two consecutive soil moisture values and one roughness parameter) could be solved simultaneously by minimizing a cost function. The algorithm was tested with a series of Sentinel-1 dual-channel (VV + VH) data over croplands (sugarcane and cassava) of Northeast Thailand with an upscaling resolution of 1 km. Results show that the proposed algorithm could well capture the temporal change of soil moisture with root-mean-square errors within 0.06 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> when ignoring days with precipitation, and could achieve a similar spatial pattern of soil moisture as detected from the Soil Moisture Active Passive mission, indicating the Sentinel-1 might be a proper tool for agricultural water management.

Evaluation of SMAP/Sentinel 1 High-Resolution Soil Moisture Data to Detect Irrigation Over Agricultural Domain

Irrigation is not well represented in land surface, hydrological, and climate models. One way to account for irrigation is by assimilating satellite soil moisture data that contains irrigation signal with land surface models. In this study, the irrigation detection ability of SMAP enhanced 9 km and SMAP-Sentinel 1 (SMAP-S1), 3 km and 1 km soil moisture products are evaluated using the first moment (mean) and the second moment (variability) of soil moisture data. The SMAP enhanced 9 km soil moisture product lacks irrigation signals in an irrigated plain south of Urmia Lake, whereas SMAP-S1 products record irrigation signal in soil moisture variability. Despite observing higher variability over irrigated areas, there are only small and inconsistent wet biases observed over irrigated pixels relative to nearby nonirrigated pixels during the irrigation season. This is partly attributable to the climatology vegetation water content used in the SMAP-S1 soil moisture retrieval algorithm that is not accounting for crop rotation and land management. Thus, in the second part of this study, we updated the retrieval algorithm to use dynamic vegetation water content. The update increased vegetation water content up to 1 kg/m2 which corresponds with a 0.05 cm3/cm3 increase in soil moisture during irrigation season. The update does not notably change soil moisture retrievals off season. This study shows that irrigation signals are present in both the first and second moment of soil moisture time series, and employing dynamic vegetation water content in the SMAP-S1 algorithm can enhance the irrigation signal over agricultural regions.

Ground-based data from wheat cropping fields in Australia for development of soil moisture retrieval algorithm using satellite images

Soil moisture is an important data which can be used for crop growth estimation, drought prediction, irrigation, and development of hydrological model. However, it is difficult to obtain soil moisture data from inaccessible area or very large area using only general field campaign. For this reason, many soil moisture retrieval algorithms have been developed based on satellite remote sensing technique. It should be noted that both satellite images and ground-based data for the region of interest are required to effectively develop the soil moisture retrieval algorithm using satellite images. Thus, Korea aerospace research institute, KARI, have collected ground-based data containing soil moisture, soil temperature, and crop height in collaboration with the university of Melbourne from wheat cropping fields in Australia which are suitable for the development of soil moisture retrieval algorithm. The ground-based data was collected from wheat cropping fields containing various types of soils for about 7 months from May 2019 to November 2019.

Improving ASCAT Soil Moisture Retrievals With an Enhanced Spatially Variable Vegetation Parameterization

This study investigates the performance of the TU Wien soil moisture retrieval (TUW-SMR) algorithm by adapting the strength of the vegetation correction. The semiempirical change detection method TUW-SMR exploits the multiangle backscatter observations from spaceborne fan-beam scatterometer systems in order to derive surface soil moisture information expressed in the degree of saturation. The vegetation parameterization of TUW-SMR is controlled by the dry and wet crossover angles that are used to determine the dry and wet backscatter reference. Backscatter observations from the Advanced Scatterometer (ASCAT) are used to produce four soil moisture data sets based on different dry and wet crossover angles describing: 1) a static, respectively, no vegetation correction; 2) the currently used seasonal vegetation correction; 3) a stronger seasonal vegetation correction; and 4) a spatially variable seasonal vegetation correction with the stronger vegetation correction over vegetated areas and no vegetation correction over bare land. All four ASCAT soil moisture data sets are evaluated against soil moisture estimates from GLDAS-2.1 Noah land surface model and the European Space Agency (ESA) climate change initiative (CCI) Passive v04.5 soil moisture product using the triple collocation method and traditional correlation analysis. The results show that the spatially variable vegetation correction overall improves soil moisture estimates in both more densely vegetated areas, e.g., in large parts of North America and Europe, and more sparsely vegetated, e.g., Western Africa. Nonetheless, the experiment also provides insight into challenging retrieval conditions where the TUW-SMR fails to take all relevant backscatter processes into account, e.g., wetlands and bare soils with subsurface scattering.

Retrieving Soil Moisture Over Soybean Fields During Growing Season Through Polarimetric Decomposition

Soil moisture ( Mv ) estimation and monitoring over agricultural areas using Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) are often affected by vegetation cover during the growing season. Volume scattering and vegetation attenuation can complicate the received SAR backscatter signal when microwave interacts with the vegetation canopy. To address the existing problems, this article employed the model-based polarimetric decomposition method considering the two-way attenuation to remove the volume scattering and vegetation attenuation. A deorientation process of SAR data was applied to remove the influence of randomly distributed target orientation angles before the polarimetric decomposition. To parameterize the two-way attenuation, Radar Vegetation Index derived from the SAR intensity images was adopted. The Dubois model was used to describe backscattering from the underlying bare soil. Since the soil roughness parameters are difficult to measure under vegetation cover, the optimum surface roughness method was used to parameterize the Dubois model. This soil moisture retrieval algorithm was applied to the polarimetric multitemporal RADARSAT-2 SAR data over soybean fields. The validation indicates the root-mean-square error of 9.2 vol.% and 8.2 vol.% at HH and VV polarization, respectively, over the entire soybean growing period, suggesting that the proposed method is capable of reducing the effect of vegetation cover for soil moisture monitoring over the soybean field.

Global Soil Moisture Retrievals From the Chinese FY-3D Microwave Radiation Imager

The FengYun-3 (FY-3) series satellite is the second generation of Chinese polar-orbiting meteorological satellite missions. The FY-3D satellite was launched on November 2017 and has been providing valuable data for meteorological applications, including brightness temperature ( T <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">B</sub> ) data from the MicroWave Radiation Imager (MWRI). In this study, we developed a global soil moisture retrieval algorithm, based on the radiative transfer equation (RTE) for using the FY-3D MWRI T <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">B</sub> to continue the soil moisture record from FY-3 satellites. We adopted a new empirical model to compute vegetation water content (VWC) based on the leaf area index (LAI) and canopy height ( H) for vegetation effects correction. The Q <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">p</sub> model, which addresses the soil surface roughness effects using dual-polarization information, is then used for soil moisture retrieval. Validation of the FY-3D soil moisture was conducted with the in-situ data and the validation results showed encouraging accuracy over a variety of landcovers, with bias and unbiased root-mean-squared difference (ubRMSE) at or below the level of 0.06 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> . Monthly averaged soil moisture products generated from FY-3D could represent the seasonal changes in soil moisture and show reasonable spatial distribution of soil moisture at a global scale.

The Impact of In Situ Probe Orientation on SMAP Validation Statistics

Ongoing evaluation of the soil moisture active passive (SMAP) soil moisture products has utilized validation networks distributed in several regions around the world. The <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">in situ</i> reference used for validation of the soil moisture retrieval algorithm is associated with measurements from soil moisture probes typically located at 5 cm beneath the soil surface; however, some networks also consider a vertically oriented probe that measures from 0 to 5 cm. In this study, we compare the correlation and unbiased root mean square error (ubRMSE) from the SMAP L2 radiometer soil moisture product when compared to <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">in situ</i> measurements taken at 5 cm (approximately 3.5–6.5 cm) below the surface and measurements taken as an integrated measure from 0 to 5.7 cm. The data were obtained from two SMAP validation networks in Canada: the Kenaston network in Saskatchewan and Carman network situated in Manitoba. At both sites, correlations between the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">in situ</i> and the SMAP L2 product were consistently higher with vertically oriented probes following rain events. With respect to the ubRMSE, the vertically oriented probes at the Carman site had lower ubRMSE with the SMAP product than the horizontal probes that are currently used for validation activities. In some cases, vertical probe information should be considered in validation approaches when this data is available and could be considered in the design of <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">in situ</i> calibration/validation networks. These results may be useful in design considerations of networks for upcoming soil moisture product validation.

On the Radiative Transfer Model for Soil Moisture across Space, Time and Hydro-Climates

A framework is proposed for understanding the efficacy of the microwave radiative transfer model (RTM) of soil moisture with different support scales, seasonality (time), hydroclimates, and aggregation (scaling) methods. In this paper, the sensitivity of brightness temperature TB (H- and V-polarization) to physical variables (soil moisture, soil texture, surface roughness, surface temperature, and vegetation characteristics) is studied. Our results indicate that the sensitivity of brightness temperature (V- or H-polarization) is determined by the upscaling method and heterogeneity observed in the physical variables. Under higher heterogeneity, the TB sensitivity to vegetation and roughness followed a logarithmic function with an increasing support scale, while an exponential function is followed under lower heterogeneity. Surface temperature always followed an exponential function under all conditions. The sensitivity of TB at H- or V- polarization to soil and vegetation characteristics varied with the spatial scale (extent and support) and the amount of biomass observed. Thus, choosing an H- or V-polarization algorithm for soil moisture retrieval is a tradeoff between support scales, and land surface heterogeneity. For largely undisturbed natural environments such as SGP’97 and SMEX04, the sensitivity of TB to variables remains nearly uniform and is not influenced by extent, support scales, or an upscaling method. On the contrary, for anthropogenically-manipulated environments such as SMEX02 and SMAPVEX12, the sensitivity to variables is highly influenced by the distribution of land surface heterogeneity and upscaling methods.

L-Band Vegetation Optical Depth Estimation Using Transmitted GNSS Signals: Application to GNSS-Reflectometry and Positioning

At L-band (1–2 GHz), and particularly in microwave radiometry (1.413 GHz), vegetation has been traditionally modeled with the τ-ω model. This model has also been used to compensate for vegetation effects in Global Navigation Satellite Systems-Reflectometry (GNSS-R) with modest success. This manuscript presents an analysis of the vegetation impact on GPS L1 C/A (coarse acquisition code) signals in terms of attenuation and depolarization. A dual polarized instrument with commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) GPS receivers as back-ends was installed for more than a year under a beech forest collecting carrier-to-noise (C/N0) data. These data were compared to different ground-truth datasets (greenness, blueness, and redness indices, sky cover index, rain data, leaf area index or LAI, and normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI)). The highest correlation observed is between C/N0 and NDVI data, obtaining R2 coefficients larger than 0.85 independently from the elevation angle, suggesting that for beech forest, NDVI is a good descriptor of signal attenuation at L-band, which is known to be related to the vegetation optical depth (VOD). Depolarization effects were also studied, and were found to be significant at elevation angles as large as ~50°. Data were also fit to a simple τ-ω model to estimate a single scattering albedo parameter (ω) to try to compensate for vegetation scattering effects in soil moisture retrieval algorithms using GNSS-R. It is found that, even including dependence on the elevation angle (ω(θe)), at elevation angles smaller than ~67°, the ω(θe) model is not related to the NDVI. This limits the range of elevation angles that can be used for soil moisture retrievals using GNSS-R. Finally, errors of the GPS-derived position were computed over time to assess vegetation impact on the accuracy of the positioning.

Soil moisture retrievals using L-band radiometry from variable angular ground-based and airborne observations

Surface soil moisture is a vital variable in the process of energy exchange between the land and atmosphere. Monitoring the surface soil moisture at the local and global scales has become feasible due to the development of microwave remote sensing. With the new development of potential satellite missions, it is important to evaluate existing soil moisture retrieval algorithms, which will greatly contribute to the improvement of current soil moisture products and the development of new methodologies. This paper compared the performance of four well-known soil moisture retrieval algorithms with L-band radiometry at fixed incidence angles, including the single channel algorithm at horizontal polarization (SCA-H), the single channel algorithm at vertical polarization (SCA-V), the dual channel algorithm (DCA), and the land parameter retrieval model (LPRM). The experimental data used for evaluation was from the Soil Moisture Experiment in the Luan River (SMELR), which consists of variable angular ground-based and airborne observations covering a wide range of incidence angles (22.5°–55°) at L-band. The microwave radiative transfer models are set to be consistent to guarantee that the four different algorithms are comparable. The results showed that the retrieval accuracy of the SCA-H and SCA-V is significantly affected by the input vegetation optical depth, and the calibration of vegetation parameters should be considered in the implementation of the SCA-H and SCA-V. The DCA does not rely on the auxiliary vegetation information and can also achieve good performance for both the soil moisture and vegetation optical depth. However, its retrieval requires a penalty on parameter constraints since the input brightness temperatures at horizontal and vertical polarization are correlated. The LPRM has a poor performance at incidence angles less than 30°, as it analytically utilizes the polarization difference in the brightness temperature, which is quite small at lower incidence angles. The accuracy of four soil moisture algorithms achieve their best performances at intermediate incidence angles of 40° to 45°, and is slightly degraded when the incident angles increased to larger than 50°, which is contributed to the increasing vegetation effects and depolarization that leads to an information loss. These findings provide quantitative evidence to help understand the differences in various current soil moisture algorithms and further promote the development of new methodologies for future soil moisture missions.

High-Precision Soil Moisture Mapping Based on Multi-Model Coupling and Background Knowledge, Over Vegetated Areas Using Chinese GF-3 and GF-1 Satellite Data

This paper proposes a combined approach comprising a set of methods for the high-precision mapping of soil moisture in a study area located in Jiangsu Province of China, based on the Chinese C-band synthetic aperture radar data of GF-3 and high spatial-resolution optical data of GF-1, in situ experimental datasets and background knowledge. The study was conducted in three stages: First, in the process of eliminating the effect of vegetation canopy, an empirical vegetation water content model and a water cloud model with localized parameters were developed to obtain the bare soil backscattering coefficient. Second, four commonly used models (advanced integral equation model (AIEM), look-up table (LUT) method, Oh model, and the Dubois model) were coupled to acquire nine soil moisture retrieval maps and algorithms. Finally, a simple and effective optimal solution method was proposed to select and combine the nine algorithms based on classification strategies devised using three types of background knowledge. A comprehensive evaluation was carried out on each soil moisture map in terms of the root-mean-square-error (RMSE), Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC), mean absolute error (MAE), and mean bias (bias). The results show that for the nine individual algorithms, the estimated model constructed using the AIEM (mv1) was significantly more accurate than those constructed using the other models (RMSE = 0.0321 cm³/cm³, MAE = 0.0260 cm³/cm³, and PCC = 0.9115), followed by the Oh model (m_v5) and LUT inversion method under HH polarization (mv2). Compared with the independent algorithms, the optimal solution methods have significant advantages; the soil moisture map obtained using the classification strategy based on the percentage content of clay was the most satisfactory (RMSE = 0.0271 cm³/cm³, MAE = 0.0225 cm³/cm³, and PCC = 0.9364). This combined method could not only effectively integrate the optical and radar satellite data but also couple a variety of commonly used inversion models, and at the same time, background knowledge was introduced into the optimal solution method. Thus, we provide a new method for the high-precision mapping of soil moisture in areas with a complex underlying surface.

Are extreme soil moisture deficits captured by remotely sensed data retrievals?

ABSTRACT Accurate soil moisture (SM) data are key for climate and surface-atmosphere simulations associated with prediction and analysis of weather and climate variability. Here, we assessed in situ vs. remotely sensed SM discrepancies in a humid watershed during an extreme drought and an arid watershed under peak dry-season conditions. Using in situ SM measurements from the Soil and Climate Analysis Network (SCAN) we compared timeseries data with two remotely sensed data sources: The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) and the European Space Agency's Soil Moisture Ocean Salinity (SMOS) radiometers. Over a nearly three-year period (31 March, 2015 to 31 December, 2017), SMAP timeseries had a higher correlation with SCAN data (R 2 = 0.24 to 0.75) compared to SMOS estimates (R 2 = 0.04 to 0.68) with lower average RMSE (0.03 vs. 0.19 cm3 cm-3). Possible sources of error were identified related to underlying assumptions in the SM retrieval algorithm, principally that soil and vegetation canopy temperatures are in equilibrium during satellite retrievals and that vegetation scattering and attenuation may be accurately represented when using static, long-term averages of NDVI. We concluded that although SMAP SM retrievals reflect dry periods observed in in situ SM timeseries, the magnitude of extreme conditions were underestimated.

A New Soil Moisture Retrieval Algorithm from the L-Band Passive Microwave Brightness Temperature Based on the Change Detection Principle

The launch of the SMOS (Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity) and SMAP (Soil Moisture Active Passive) satellites has led to the development of a series of L-band soil moisture retrieval algorithms. In these algorithms, many input parameters (such as leaf area index and soil texture) and empirical coefficients (such as roughness coefficient (hP, NRP) and crop structure parameter (bP, ttP)) are needed to calculate surface soil moisture (SSM) from microwave brightness temperature. Many previous studies have focused on how to determine the value of these coefficients and input parameters. Nevertheless, it can be difficult to obtain their ‘real’ values with low uncertainty across large spatial scales. To avoid this problem, a passive microwave remote sensing SSM inversion algorithm based on the principle of change detection was proposed and tested using theoretical simulation and a field SSM dataset for an agricultural area in northeastern China. This algorithm was initially used to estimate SSM for radar remote sensing. First, theoretical simulation results were used to confirm the linear relationship between the change rates for SSM and surface emissivity, for both H and V polarization. This demonstrated the reliability of the change detection algorithm. Second, minimum emissivity (or the difference between maximum emissivity and minimum emissivity) was modeled with a linear relationship between vegetation water content, derived from a three-year (2016–2018) SMAP L3 SSM dataset. Third, SSM values estimated by the change detection algorithm were in good agreement with SMAP L3 SSM and field SSM, with RMSE values ranging from 0.015~0.031 cm3/cm3 and 0.038~0.051 cm3/cm3, respectively. The V polarization SSM accuracy was higher than H polarization and combined H and V polarization accuracy. The retrieved SSM error from the change detection algorithm was similar to SMAP SSM due to errors inherited from the training dataset. The SSM algorithm proposed here is simple in form, has fewer input parameters, and avoids the uncertainty of input parameters. It is very suitable for global applications and will provide a new algorithm option for SSM estimation from microwave brightness temperature.

Effect of Structural Uncertainty in Passive Microwave Soil Moisture Retrieval Algorithm.

Passive microwave sensors use a radiative transfer model (RTM) to retrieve soil moisture (SM) using brightness temperatures (TB) at low microwave frequencies. Vegetation optical depth (VOD) is a key input to the RTM. Retrieval algorithms can analytically invert the RTM using dual-polarized TB measurements to retrieve the VOD and SM concurrently. Algorithms in this regard typically use the τ-ω types of models, which consist of two third-order polynomial equations and, thus, can have multiple solutions. Through this work, we find that uncertainty occurs due to the structural indeterminacy that is inherent in all τ-ω types of models in passive microwave SM retrieval algorithms. In the process, a new analytical solution for concurrent VOD and SM retrieval is presented, along with two widely used existing analytical solutions. All three solutions are applied to a fixed framework of RTM to retrieve VOD and SM on a global scale, using X-band Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer-Earth Observing System (AMSR-E) TB data. Results indicate that, with structural uncertainty, there ensues a noticeable impact on the VOD and SM retrievals. In an era where the sensitivity of retrieval algorithms is still being researched, we believe the structural indeterminacy of RTM identified here would contribute to uncertainty in the soil moisture retrievals.

Infrared Soil Moisture Retrieval Algorithm Using Temperature-Vegetation Dryness Index and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer Data

Most infrared satellite remote sensors have a higher spatial resolution than microwave satellite sensors. Microwave satellite remote sensing has proven successful for the retrieval of soil moisture (SM) information. In this study, we propose a SM retrieval algorithm based on temperature vegetation dryness index (TVDI), a function of land surface temperature (LST), and the normalized difference vegetative index (NDVI) provided by Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data. We implemented the LST correction with elevation effect. Conversion relationships between TVDI and SM content for a variety of land types were obtained from spatial and temporal collocation of TVDI and Global Land Data Assimilation System (GLDAS) SM content for 2014. From the comparison with the GLDAS SM for 2015, the proposed TVDI-based SM algorithm showed good performance with CC = 0.609, bias = −0.035 m3/m3, and root-mean-square-error (RMSE) = 0.047 m3/m3, while the Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) and Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) SMs present CC = 0.637 and 0.741, bias = 0.042 and 0.010 m3/m3, and RMSE = 0.152 and 0.103 m3/m3, respectively. For the in situ SM measurements of the Korea Rural Development Administration (RDA), the proposed TVDI-based SM algorithm yielded CC = 0.556, bias = −0.039 m3/m3, and RMSE = 0.051 m3/m3 excluding the winter season. Consequently, the proposed SM algorithm could contribute to complementing the low spatial resolutions of microwave satellite SM products and low temporal resolutions of GLDAS SM products.