Estimation of Soil Moisture Index Using Multi-Temporal Sentinel-1 Images over Poyang Lake Ungauged Zone

Remote Sensing

Jianmin Yin¹  Yufang Zhang²  Kun Sun²  Jianya Gong²  Xiaoling Chen² 

[1] Jiangxi Provincial Meteorological Observatory, Jiangxi Meteorological Bureau, Nanchang 330046, China;State Key Laboratory of Information Engineering in Surveying, Mapping and Remote Sensing, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China;

关键词: Sentinel-1;    linear mixed effects model;    soil moisture index;    Poyang Lake ungauged zone;   

DOI  :  10.3390/rs10010012

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

The C-band radar instruments onboard the two-satellite GMES Sentinel-1 constellation provide global measurements with short revisit time (about six days) and medium spatial resolution (5 × 20 m), which are appropriate for watershed scale hydrological applications. This paper aims to explore the potential of Sentinel-1 for estimating surface soil moisture using a multi-temporal approach. To this end, a linear mixed effects (LME) model was developed over Poyang Lake ungauged zone, using time series Sentinel 1A and 1B images and soil moisture ground measurements from 15 automatic observation sites. The model assumed a linear relationship that varied with both time and space between soil moisture and backscattering coefficient (SM- σ 0 ). Results showed that three LME models developed with different polarizedσ 0images all meet the European Space Agency (ESA) accuracy requirement for GMES soil moisture product (≤5% in volume), with the vertical transmit and vertical receive (VV) polarized model achieving the best performance. However, the SM- σ 0relationship was found to depend strongly on space, making it difficult to predict absolute soil moisture for each grid. Therefore, a relative soil moisture index was then proposed to correct for site effect. When compared with those of the linear fixed effects model, the soil moisture indices predicted by the LME model captured the temporal dynamics of measured soil moisture better, with the overall R2 and cross-validated R2 being 0.68 and 0.64, respectively. These results indicate that the LME model can be effectively applied to estimate soil moisture from multi-temporal Sentinel-1 images, which is useful for monitoring flood and drought disasters, and for improving stream flow prediction over ungauged zones.

【 授权许可】

Unknown