Title
Estimating High-Resolution Soil Moisture Over Mountainous Regions Using Remotely-Sensed Multispectral and Topographic Data
Abstract
A surface soil moisture (SM) condition at high spatiotemportal resolutions is required by regional Earth system applications. Here, we mapped daily 1-km SM in the Babao River Basin in the northwest of China during the summers from 2013 to 2015 using a random forest (RF) method by merging SM information retrieved from in situ measurements, optical/thermal remote sensing, and topographical indices. Relative importance analysis was used to determine the optimal predictors for estimating high-resolution SM. A specific RF model (RFVI+sup) was constructed using the optimal predictors including remote sensing albedo, apparent thermal inertia (ATI), normalized difference vegetation index, normalized difference infrared index 5, soil adjusted vegetation index, and topographical indices (aspect and elevation). The RFVI+sup also accounted for missing observations of the thermal index (e.g., ATI) over the mountainous regions. In the comparison between the SM estimates using the new RFVI+sup model and other RF models, the spatial coverage of available estimates increased from 14% to 64% over the study region, the correlation coefficient values were improved to 0.75, the unbiased root-mean-squared difference values decreased to 0.032 m(3)/m(3). Thus, the proposed RF method provided accurate SM estimates with high spatiotemporal resolution over the mountainous regions, by merging multiresource datasets from in situ measurements, remotely-sensed, and topographical indices.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1109/JSTARS.2022.3166974
IEEE JOURNAL OF SELECTED TOPICS IN APPLIED EARTH OBSERVATIONS AND REMOTE SENSING
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Indexes, Vegetation mapping, Radio frequency, Optical sensors, Microwave measurement, Rivers, Optical reflection, High resolution, mountainous regions, optical index, random forest (RF) method, soil moisture (SM), thermal index
Journal
15
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1939-1404
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
14
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Lei Fan100.34
Amen Al-Yaari200.34
Frederic Frappart300.34
Jian Peng4127.52
Jianguang Wen56721.30
Qing Xiao689.06
Rui Jin700.68
Xiaojun Li835.83
Xiangzhuo Liu900.34
Mengjia Wang1000.34
Xiu-zhi Chen1101.35
Lin Zhao1202.70
Mingguo Ma1313525.69
Jean-Pierre Wigneron1472077.00