A Method to Assess the Performance of SAR-Derived Surface Soil Moisture Products

A Method to Assess the Performance of SAR-Derived Surface Soil Moisture Products

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Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is a remote sensing technique for mapping of soil moisture with high spatial resolution.C-band SAR can resolve features at field scale, or better, but responds to moisture only within the top 1 to 2 cm of the soil.When galaxy buds skin validating SAR-derived soil moisture products against standard in situ measurements at 5 to 10 cm depth, the greater moisture variability at the soil surface may be inaccurately categorized as measurement error.An alternative method was developed where the C-band SAR product is validated against soil moisture simulated at 2 cm depth by the HYDRUS-1D model.This reproduces soil moisture depth profiles from daily meteorological observations, leaf area index, and soil hydraulic parameters.

The model was duvaltc.com fitted at 13 COSMOS-UK sites so that the model output at 10 cm depth closely reproduced the cosmic ray neutron sensor data.At ten of the sites studied, there was an improvement of up to 8% in root-mean-squared difference by validating the Copernicus surface soil moisture (SSM) product at 2 cm compared to 10 cm.This suggests that Copernicus SSM and other C-band SAR surface soil moisture algorithms may be more accurate than have hitherto been acknowledged.