Estimation of root zone soil moisture using passive microwave remote sensing: A case study for rice and wheat crops for three states in the Indo-Gangetic basin

High-resolution surface and rootzone soil moisture over US cropland: A novel framework assimilating multi-source remote sensing data, machine learning, and the Layered Green and Ampt Infiltration with Redistribution model

Land surface models (LSMs) are limited in their ability to reproduce observed soil moisture partially due to uncertainties in model parameters. Here we conduct a variance-based sensitivity analysis to quantify the relative contribution of different model parameters and their interactions to the uncertainty in the surface and root-zone soil moisture in the Community Land Model 5.0 (CLM5). We focus on soil-texture-related parameters (porosity, saturated matric potential, saturated hydraulic conductivity, shape parameter of soil-water retention model) and organic matter fraction. A Gaussian process emulator is constructed based on CLM5 simulations and used to estimate soil moisture across the five-dimensional parameter space for sensitivity analysis. The procedure is demonstrated for four seasons across various U.S. sites of distinct soil and vegetation types. We find that the emulator captures well the CLM5 behavior across the parameter space for different soil textures and seasons. The uncertainties of surface and root-zone soil moisture are dominated by the uncertainties in porosity and shape parameter with negligible parametric interactions. However, relative importance of porosity versus shape parameter varies with soil textures (sites), depths (surface versus root zone), and seasons. At most of the sites, surface soil moisture uncertainty is attributed largely to shape parameter uncertainty, while porosity uncertainty is more important for the root-zone soil moisture uncertainty. All individual parameter and interaction effects demonstrate less variability across different soil textures and seasons for root zone than for surface soil moisture. These results provide scientific guidance to prioritize reducing the uncertainty of sensitive parameters for improving soil moisture modeling with CLM.

Multi-objective calibration of a hydrologic model using spatially distributed remotely sensed/in-situ soil moisture

The NASA Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission Level-4 Soil Moisture (L4_SM) product provides global, 9-km resolution, 3-hourly surface (0-5 cm) and root-zone (0-100 cm) soil moisture from April 2015 to present with a mean latency of 2.5 days from the time of observation.  The product is based on the assimilation of SMAP L-band (1.4 GHz) brightness temperature (Tb) observations into the NASA Catchment land surface model as the model is driven with observations-based precipitation forcing. In this presentation, we describe three recent improvements in the L4_SM algorithm.  First, satellite- and gauge-based precipitation from the NASA Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for the Global Precipitation Measurement mission (IMERG) are used in two ways: (i) The climatology to which all L4_SM precipitation forcing inputs are rescaled is based on IMERG-Final (Version 06B) data, replacing the Global Precipitation Climatology Project v2.2 data used in previous L4_SM versions, and (ii) the precipitation forcing outside of North America and the high latitudes is corrected to match the daily totals from IMERG, replacing the gauge-only, daily product or uncorrected weather analysis precipitation used there in earlier L4_SM versions.  Second, the Catchment model now includes the recently developed PEATCLSM hydrology module for peatlands and uses an updated global map of peatlands.  Third, revised parameters are used in the L-band radiative transfer model that converts the simulated soil moisture and temperature estimates into Tb predictions for use in the radiance-based L4_SM analysis.  Specifically, climatological parameters for the scattering albedo, soil roughness, and (seasonally-varying) vegetation opacity were derived from the SMAP Level-2 radiometer soil moisture retrieval product.   The revised precipitation inputs result in considerably improved anomaly time series correlation skill of L4_SM surface soil moisture in South America, Africa, Australia, and parts of East Asia.  Particularly large improvements are seen in central Australia and Myanmar, where the quality of the gauge-only precipitation product used in earlier L4_SM versions was particularly poor.  In peatlands, the dynamics of water table depth, surface soil moisture and evapotranspiration are considerably improved when evaluated against in situ measurements.  Moreover, the time series correlation of surface and root-zone soil moisture vs. in situ measurements is slightly improved, owing to the improved annual cycle phasing of the Level-2 derived vegetation opacity parameters.  Collectively, these improvements are also manifested in smaller Tb observation-minus-forecast residuals.

The NASA Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) mission Level‐4 Soil Moisture (L.4_SM) product provides global, 3‐hourly, 9‐km resolution estimates of surface (0–5 cm) and root zone (0–100 cm) soil moisture with a mean latency of ~2.5 days. The underlying L4_SM algorithm assimilates SMAP radiometer brightness temperature (Tb) observations into the NASA Catchment land surface model using a spatially distributed ensemble Kalman filter. In Version 4 of the L4_SM modeling system the upward recharge of surface soil moisture from below under nonequilibrium conditions was reduced, resulting in less bias and improved dynamic range of L4_SM surface soil moisture compared to earlier versions. This change and additional technical modifications to the system reduce the mean and standard deviation of the observation‐minus‐forecast Tb residuals and overall soil moisture analysis increments while maintaining the skill of the L4_SM soil moisture estimates versus independent in situ measurements; the average, bias‐adjusted root‐mean‐square error in Version 4 is 0.039 m3/m3 for surface and 0.026 m3/m3 for root zone soil moisture. Moreover, the coverage of assimilated SMAP observations in Version 4 is near global owing to the use of additional satellite Tb records for algorithm calibration. L4_SM soil moisture uncertainty estimates are biased low (by 0.01–0.02 m3/m3) against actual errors (computed versus in situ measurements). L4_SM runoff estimates, an additional product of the L4_SM algorithm, are biased low (by 35 mm/year) against streamflow measurements. Compared to Version 3, bias in Version 4 is reduced by 46% for surface soil moisture uncertainty estimates and by 33% for runoff estimates.

In water‐limited regions, it is important to understand the response of vegetation to hydrologic predictors for fire management and water resource planning. We present a novel spatially distributed analysis of ecohydrological interactions in the semi‐arid Colorado River Basin (CRB) over 18 years, 2001–2019. The hydrologic predictors used include precipitation from the Integrated Multi‐satellitE Retrievals for GPM, 0‐ to 10‐cm‐depth surface soil moisture (SSM) estimations from the National Land Data Assimilation System, and newly available 0‐ to 40‐cm depth Soil MERGE root zone soil moisture (RZSM) estimations. These are evaluated using time‐lagged correlations with the Enhanced Vegetation Index (EVI) from MODerate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS). We demonstrate that EVI response is strongest and most immediate to the hydrologic predictors in the hot and dry southwestern CRB, with lag times of 0–32 days. RZSM was expected to provide the best predictor of EVI, but we found SSM to be a superior predictor of EVI with interquartile range correlations of 0.20–0.37 across the CRB. RZSM had slightly lower interquartile range correlations of 0.15–0.35, and precipitation was the least effective predictor of EVI with interquartile range correlations of 0.11–0.26. Plotting these cross‐correlations provides a spatially explicit overview of temporal dependence between SSM, RZSM, precipitation, and EVI with publicly available datasets.

The difficulty of accurate and large-scale measurement for surface parameters limits the regional surface soil moisture (SSM) estimation using synthetic aperture radar (SAR). Moreover, the coarse resolution of soil moisture products generated by existing methods, which fuse SAR and passive microwave products, cannot fully satisfy the requirement of specific regional applications. To solve this problem, an SAR-optical data fusion method for soil moisture estimation (SOFSME) based on a cascade neural network is proposed in this study. SOFSME obtains surface parameters from historical soil moisture images and related environmental images to estimate a SSM image with high resolution at large scale from Sentinel-1A C-band SAR data. Validation experiments in single and multiple land-use type areas showed that the SOFSME performed best on bare soil areas with a median root mean square error of 0.0203. The median universal image quality index of estimated soil moisture image was 0.1454, which was better for single cropland areas than multi-land-use type areas. The Pearson correlation coefficient showed a median value of 0.7645 in both experiments. These results showed that the SOFSME had high accuracy, availability, and stability in regional soil moisture estimation. Compared with existing methods, the SOFSME can provide high-quality soil moisture images and does not directly depend on field measurement data. Thus, the proposed SOFSME method is of great value for high-resolution soil moisture estimation in more regional applications.

Inversion of soil hydraulic properties from the DEnKF analysis of SMOS soil moisture over West Africa

Distinguishing the effects of climate change and vegetation greening on soil moisture variability along aridity gradient in the drylands of northern China

Quantification of root-zone soil moisture (RZSM) is crucial for agricultural applications and soil sciences. RZSM impacts processes such as vegetation transpiration and water percolation. Surface soil moisture (SSM) can be assessed through active and passive microwave remote sensing methods, but no current sensor enables direct RZSM retrieval. Spatial maps of RZSM can be retrieved via proxy observations (vegetation stress, water storage change, and surface soil moisture) or via land surface model predictions. In this study, we investigated the combination of surface soil moisture information with process-based inferred features involving artificial neural networks (ANNs). We considered the infiltration process through the soil water index (SWI) computed with a recursive exponential filter and the evaporation process through the evaporative efficiency computed based on a MODIS remote sensing dataset and simplified analytical model, while vegetation growth was expressed through normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) time series. Several ANN models with different sets of features were developed. Training was conducted considering in situ stations distributed several areas worldwide characterized by different soil and climate patterns of the International Soil Moisture Network (ISMN), and testing was applied to stations of the same data hosting facility. The results indicate that the integration of process-based features into ANN models increased the overall performance over the reference model level in which only SSM features were considered. In arid and semi-arid areas, for instance, performance enhancement was observed when the evaporative efficiency was integrated into the ANN models. To assess the robustness of the approach, the trained models were applied on observation sites in Tunisia, Italy and South-India that are not part of ISMN. The results reveal that joint use of surface soil moisture, evaporative efficiency, NDVI and recursive exponential filter represented the best alternative for more accurate predictions in the case of Tunisia, where the mean correlation of the predicted RZSM based on SSM only sharply increased from 0.443 to 0.801 when process-based features were integrated into the ANN models in addition to SSM. However, process-based features have no to little added value in temperate to tropical conditions.

High resolution root-zone soil moisture (SM) maps are important for understanding the spatial variability of water availability in agriculture, ecosystems research and water resources management. Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) can flexibly monitor land surfaces with thermal and optical imagery at very high spatial resolution (meter level, VHR) for most weather conditions. We modified the temperature–vegetation triangle approach to transfer it from satellite to UAS remote sensing. To consider the effects of the limited coverage of UAS mapping, theoretical dry/wet edges were introduced. The new method was tested on a bioenergy willow short rotation coppice site during growing seasons of 2016 and 2017. We demonstrated that by incorporating surface roughness parameters from the structure-from-motion in the interpretation of the measured land surface-atmosphere temperature gradients, the estimates of SM significantly improved. The correlation coefficient between estimated and measured SM increased from not significant to 0.69 and the root mean square deviation decreased from 0.045 m3∙m−3 to 0.025 m3∙m−3 when considering temporal dynamics of surface roughness in the approach. The estimated SM correlated better with in-situ root-zone SM (15–30 cm) than with surface SM (0–5 cm) which is an important advantage over alternative remote sensing methods to estimate SM. The optimal spatial resolution of the triangle approach was found to be around 1.5 m, i.e. similar to the length scale of tree-crowns. This study highlights the importance of considering the 3-D fine scale canopy structure, when addressing the links between surface temperature and SM patterns via surface energy balances. Our methodology can be applied to operationally monitor VHR root-zone SM from UAS in agricultural and natural ecosystems.

Estimation of surface soil moisture (SSM) is fundamental for hydrological monitoring and agricultural management, particularly in regions affected by recurrent droughts such as central–northeastern Argentina. Data assimilation techniques provide a robust approach to estimating SSM variability by integrating numerical soil models—i.e., land surface models—with observations from satellite-based remote sensors. Satellite missions based on L-band microwave sensors, such as NASA’s SMAP and ESA’s SMOS, provide global SSM retrievals, yet these observations often exhibit systematic biases arising from instrument noise, indirect measurements (i.e., observational operator), and temporal and spatial heterogeneities. Within data assimilation techniques, the ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) has been widely employed for SSM estimation. This algorithm assumes unbiased observations; thus, bias correction becomes necessary to ensure optimal assimilation. In this study, we evaluate three off-line observational bias-correction techniques within a land data assimilation framework based on the Noah-MP v4.0.1 land surface model and an EnKF. The assessment focuses on the 2022 dry season over the endorheic Pampas region. We introduce a bias correction approach to mitigate sampling errors in cumulative distribution function (CDF) matching: (i) the climatological statistics are computed using homogeneous soil texture pixels within the bin, and (ii) a 45-day moving temporal sampling window is used to give a smoother evolution of the CDF. During dry periods, we empirically demonstrate that soil moisture probability density functions are statistically distinguishable across different soil textures within the bin. Furthermore the monthly-fixed statistics exhibited jumps during the dry season. This approach is compared with the standard CDF matching and the normal deviate scaling. These three off-line bias correction techniques are applied to correct SMAP and SMOS satellite retrievals prior to data assimilation. We show that this improved statistical sampling for CDF matching has a non-negligible impact on the SSM estimates resulting from EnKF, particularly during dry periods. The corrected sampling of CDF matching shows better alignment and stronger correlation with the time series of the independent in-situ soil moisture measurements. Overall, the study emphasizes the need for context-aware bias-correction techniques to enhance SSM data assimilation in regions with strong seasonal precipitation variations. Moreover, SSM estimations influence deeper model layers through vertical propagation of the information. These results motivate future work exploring how surface corrections might lead to enhanced subsurface estimates.

The upcoming NISAR Earth-observation satellite will utilize dual frequencies simultaneously, providing synthetic aperture radar (SAR) remote sensing data in both the L-band and S-band. With its ability to operate single-polarization, dual-polarization, and quad-polarization modes, NISAR will offer significant capabilities for land surface observation applications, particularly for estimating surface soil moisture (SSM) and surface roughness (Hrms). This study aims to demonstrate NISAR’s future potential in SSM and Hrms estimation by evaluating the single (SP), double (DP) and quad (QP) polarization configurations. Noisy synthetic NISAR-like data was generated using the Dubois-B model for both S- and L-bands. The use of a priori information on the soil moisture was also examined for SSM and Hrms estimations. Various neural networks (NNs) were trained using the noisy synthetic dataset. Validation was performed on noisy synthetic data, as real NISAR data is not yet available. Out of the NISAR configurations tested, the QP configuration was shown to be the most performant, with RMSE on SSM estimation of 4.2 vol.%, for QP configuration compared to 5.1 and 8.2 vol.% for SP and DP configurations when not using a priori knowledge of soil moisture conditions. RMSE on Hrms was 0.3 cm for QP configuration, compared to 0.7 and 0.6 cm for SP and DP configurations. The QP was also shown to be more capable of mitigating the effect of the incidence angle on the estimation of SSM and Hrms compared to the two other configurations. Moreover, simultaneous use of S- and L-bands enhances SSM and Hrms estimation compared to using either of these frequency bands alone in single-, dual-, or quad-polarization configurations. Furthermore, using a priori knowledge of soil moisture conditions was successful in improving the estimation precision for SSM for all NISAR configurations. Notably, for QP configuration, RMSE on SSM estimation was 3.9 vol.% and 3.2 vol.% when a priori information on SSM was considered respectively in dry to slightly wet and very wet conditions. These findings demonstrate the high potential of the future NISAR sensor for estimating SSM and Hrms.

Root-zone soil moisture estimation from assimilation of downscaled Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity data

Root zone soil moisture (RZSM) is a vital variable for agricultural production, water resource management and runoff prediction. Satellites provide large-scale and long-term near-surface soil moisture retrievals, which can be used to estimate RZSM through various methods. In this study, we tested the utility of an exponential filter (ExpF) using in situ soil moisture by optimizing the optimal characteristic time length T_opt for different soil depths. Furthermore, the parameter analysis showed that T_opt correlated negatively with precipitation and had no significant correlation with selected soil properties. Two approaches were taken to obtain T_opt: (1) optimization of the Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency coefficient (NSE); (2) calculation based on annual average precipitation. The precipitation-based T_pre outperformed the station-specific T_opt and stations-averaged T_opt. To apply the ExpF on grid scale, the precipitation-based T_pre considering spatial variability was adopted in the ExpF to obtain RZSM from a new soil moisture dataset RF_SMAP_L3_P (Random Forest Soil Moisture Active Passive_L3_Passive) continuous in time and space over Huai River Basin. Finally, the performance of RF_SMAP_L3_P RZSM (0–100 cm) was evaluated using in situ measurements and compared with mainstream products, for instance, Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) and Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity Level 4 (SMOS L4) RZSM. The results indicated that RF_SMAP_L3_P RZSM could captured the temporal variation of measured RZSM best with R value of 0.586, followed by SMAP L4, which had the lowest bias value of 0.03, and SMOS L4 significantly underestimated the measured RZSM with bias value of −0.048 in the basin. Higher accuracy of RF_SMAP_L3_P RZSM was found in the flood period compared with the non-flood period, which indicates a better application for ExpF in wetter weather conditions.