Global downscaling of remotely sensed soil moisture using neural networks

Abstract

Characterizing soil moisture at spatiotemporal scales relevant to land surface processes (i.e., of the order of 1km) is necessary in order to quantify its role in regional feedbacks between the land surface and the atmospheric boundary layer. Moreover, several applications such as agricultural management can benefit from soil moisture information at fine spatial scales. Soil moisture estimates from current satellite missions have a reasonably good temporal revisit over the globe (2-3-day repeat time); however, their finest spatial resolution is 9km. NASA's Soil Moisture Active Passive (SMAP) satellite has estimated soil moisture at two different spatial scales of 36 and 9km since April 2015. In this study, we develop a neural-network-based downscaling algorithm using SMAP observations and disaggregate soil moisture to 2.25km spatial resolution. Our approach uses the mean monthly Normalized Differenced Vegetation Index (NDVI) as ancillary data to quantify the subpixel heterogeneity of soil moisture. Evaluation of the downscaled soil moisture estimates against in situ observations shows that their accuracy is better than or equal to the SMAP 9km soil moisture estimates.