Geostatistical analysis of soil moisture distribution in a part of Solani River catchment

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to estimate soil moisture at spatial level by applying geostatistical techniques on the point observations of soil moisture in parts of Solani River catchment in Haridwar district of India. Undisturbed soil samples were collected at 69 locations with soil core sampler at a depth of 0–10 cm from the soil surface. Out of these, discrete soil moisture observations at 49 locations were used to generate a spatial soil moisture distribution map of the region. Two geostatistical techniques, namely, moving average and kriging, were adopted. Root mean square error (RMSE) between observed and estimated soil moisture at remaining 20 locations was determined to assess the accuracy of the estimated soil moisture. Both techniques resulted in low RMSE at small limiting distance, which increased with the increase in the limiting distance. The root mean square error varied from 7.42 to 9.77 in moving average method, while in case of kriging it varied from 7.33 to 9.99 indicating similar performance of the two techniques.