Comparison of downscaling techniques for high resolution soil moisture mapping
Abstract
Soil moisture impacts exchanges of water, energy and carbon fluxes between the land surface and the atmosphere. Passive microwave remote sensing at L-band can capture spatial and temporal patterns of soil moisture in the landscape. Both ESA and NASA have launched L-band radiometers, in the form of the SMOS and SMAP satellites respectively, to monitor soil moisture globally, every 3-day at about 40 km resolution. However, their coarse scale restricts the range of applications. While SMAP included an L-band radar to downscale the radiometer soil moisture to 9 km, the radar failed after 3 months and this initial approach is not applicable to developing a consistent long term soil moisture product across the two missions anymore. Existing optical-, radiometer-, and oversampling-based downscaling methods could be an alternative to the radar-based approach for delivering such data. Nevertheless, retrieval of a consistent high resolution soil moisture product remains a challenge, and there has been no comprehensive inter-comparison of the alternate approaches. This research undertakes an assessment of the different downscaling approaches using the SMAPEx-4 field campaign data
Cite
@article{arxiv.2012.03307,
title = {Comparison of downscaling techniques for high resolution soil moisture mapping},
author = {Sabah Sabaghy and Jeffrey Walker and Luigi Renzullo and Ruzbeh Akbar and Steven Chan and Julian Chaubell and Narendra Das and R. Scott Dunbar and Dara Entekhabi and Anouk Gevaert and Thomas Jackson and Olivier Merlin and Mahta Moghaddam and Jinzheng Peng and Jeffrey Piepmeier and Maria Piles and Gerard Portal and Christoph Rudiger and Vivien Stefan and Xiaoling Wu and Nan Ye and Simon Yueh},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.03307},
year = {2020}
}