Validation of satellite soil moisture retrievals using precipitation records in India

Abstract

Soil moisture plays crucial role in influencing the components of hydrologic cycle and thus used for large range of applications such as climate predictions, agriculture management and flood/drought modelling. The current work focuses on establishing a measure to check the performance of passive microwave satellite soil moisture data using rainfall information over India. The measure is developed based on the concepts of information theory and copulas. Two soil moisture products developed by, VUA-NASA (jointly by Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and NASA) and university of Montana are tested with the proposed measure using IMD rainfall data at 0.25° latitude-longitude spatial resolution. The measure conveyed that soil moisture product by university of Montana has outperformed over its counterpart. Further analysis concluded that under moderate climate conditions, Montana product could be used for analysis whereas for study in extreme weather conditions it may be necessary to check the usefulness of VUA-NASA product.