Spatial and temporal variability of root-zone soil moisture acquired from hydrologic modeling and AirMOSS P-band radar
Crow, W. T., S. Milak, M. Moghaddam, A. Tabatabaeenejad, S.Jaruwatanadilok, X. Yu, Y. Shi, R. H. Reichle, Y. Hagimoto, and R. H. Cuenca
Published in IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing, 2018
The accurate estimation of grid-scale fluxes of water, energy, and carbon requires consideration of subgrid spatial variability in root-zone soil moisture (RZSM). The NASA Airborne Microwave Observatory of Subcanopy and Subsurface (AirMOSS) mission represents the first systematic attempt to repeatedly map high-resolution RZSM fields using airborne remote sensing across a range of biomes. Here, we compare 3-arc-sec (∼100 m) spatial resolution AirMOSS RZSM retrievals from P-band radar acquisitions over nine separate North American study sites with analogous RZSM estimates generated by the Flux-Penn State Integrated Hydrologic Model (Flux-PIHM). The two products demonstrate comparable levels of accuracy when evaluated against ground-based soil moisture products and a significant level of temporal cross correlation. However, relative to the AirMOSS RZSM retrievals, Flux-PIHM RZSM estimates generally demonstrate much lower levels of spatial and temporal variability, and the spatial patterns captured by both products are poorly correlated. Nevertheless, based on a discussion of likely error sources affecting both products, it is argued that the spatial analysis of AirMOSS and Flux-PIHM RZSM fields provides meaningful upper and lower bounds on the potential range of RZSM spatial variability encountered across a range of natural biomes.