Preprint Article Version 1 Preserved in Portico This version is not peer-reviewed

Spatial Gap-Filling of ESA CCI Satellite-Derived Soil Moisture Based on Linear Geostatistics

Version 1 : Received: 11 September 2019 / Approved: 12 September 2019 / Online: 12 September 2019 (03:32:21 CEST)

How to cite: Llamas, R.M.; Guevara, M.; Rorabaugh, D.; Taufer, M.; Vargas, R. Spatial Gap-Filling of ESA CCI Satellite-Derived Soil Moisture Based on Linear Geostatistics. Preprints 2019, 2019090126. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints201909.0126.v1 Llamas, R.M.; Guevara, M.; Rorabaugh, D.; Taufer, M.; Vargas, R. Spatial Gap-Filling of ESA CCI Satellite-Derived Soil Moisture Based on Linear Geostatistics. Preprints 2019, 2019090126. https://doi.org/10.20944/preprints201909.0126.v1

Abstract

Soil moisture plays a key role in the Earth’s water and carbon cycles, but acquisition of continuous (i.e., gap-free) soil moisture measurements across large regions is a challenging task due to limitations of currently available point measurements. Satellites offer critical information for soil moisture over large areas on a regular basis (e.g., ESA CCI, NASA SMAP), however, there are regions where satellite-derived soil moisture cannot be estimated because of certain circumstances such as high canopy density, frozen soil, or extreme dry conditions. We compared and tested two approaches--Ordinary Kriging (OK) interpolation and General Linear Models (GLM)--to model soil moisture and fill spatial data gaps from the European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative (ESA CCI) version 3.2 (and compared them with version 4.4) from January 2000 to September 2012, over a region of 465,777 km2 across the Midwest of the USA. We tested our proposed methods to fill gaps in the original ESA CCI product, and two data subsets, removing 25% and 50% of the initially available valid pixels. We found a significant correlation coefficient (r = 0.523, RMSE = 0.092 m3m-3) between the original satellite-derived soil moisture product with ground-truth data from the North American Soil Moisture Database (NASMD). Predicted soil moisture using OK also had significant correlation coefficients with NASMD data, when using 100% (r = 0.522, RMSE = 0.092 m3m-3), 75% (r = 0.526, RMSE = 0.092 m3m-3) and 50% (r = 0.53, RMSE = 0.092 m3m-3) of available valid pixels for each month of the study period. GLM had lower but significant correlation coefficients with NASMD data (average r = 0.478, RMSE = 0.092 m3m-3) when using the same subsets of available data (i.e., 100%, 75%, 50%). Our results provide support for OK as a technique to gap-fill spatial missing values of satellite-derived soil moisture products across the Midwest of the USA.

Keywords

soil moisture; remote sensing; geostatistics; gap-filling; midwestern USA

Subject

Environmental and Earth Sciences, Environmental Science

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