Simultaneous Hyperspectral and Radar Satellite Measurements of the Soil Moisture for Hydrogeological Risk Monitoring

Emerging landslides and severe floods highlight the urgent need to analyse and support predictive models and early warning systems. Soil moisture is a crucial parameter and it can now be determined from space with resolution of few tens of meters, potentially leading to a continuous global monitoring of landslide risk. We address this issue by determining the volumetric water content (VWC) of a testbed in Southern Italy (bare soil with significant flood and landslide hazard) through the comparison of two different satellite observations on the same day. In the first observation (Sentinel-1 mission of the European Space Agency, C-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR)), the back-scattered radar signal is used to determine the VWC from the dielectric constant in the microwave range, also using a time-series approach to calibrate the algorithm. In the second observation (hyperspectral PRISMA mission of the Italian Space Agency), the short-wave infrared (SWIR) reflectance spectra are used to calculate the VWC from the spectral weight of a vibrational absorption line of liquid water (wavelengths 1800−1950nm). As the main result, we obtained a Pearson’s correlation coefficient of 0.4 between the VWC values measured with the two techniques and a separate ground-truth confirmation of absolute VWC values in the range 0.10−0.30 within ±0.05. This overlap validates that both SAR and hyperspectral data can be well calibrated and mapped with 30 meter ground resolution - given the absence of artifacts or anomalies in this particular testbed (e.g. vegetation canopy or cloud presence). If hyperspectral data in the SWIR range become more broadly available in the future, our systematic procedure to synchronise these two technologies in both space and time can be further adapted to cross-validate the global high-resolution soil moisture dataset. Ultimately, multi-mission data integration could lead to quasi-real time hydrogeological risk monitoring from space.