Validation of Satellite Soil Moisture Retrievals using Precipitation Records in India

Abstract

ABSTRACT:Soil moisture plays crucial role in influencing the components of hydrologic cycle and thus used for large range of applications such as climate predictions, agriculture management and flood/drought modelling. The current work focuses on establishing a measure to check the performance of passive microwave satellite soil moisture data using rainfall information over India. The measure is developed based on the concepts of information theory and copulas. Two soil moisture products developed by, VUA-NASA (jointly by Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and NASA) and university of Montana are tested with the proposed measure using IMD rainfall data at 0.25° latitude-longitude spatial resolution. The measure conveyed that soil moisture product by university of Montana has outperformed over its counterpart. Further analysis concluded that under moderate climate conditions, Montana product could be used for analysis whereas for study in extreme weather conditions it may be necessary to check the usefulness of VUA-NASA product.

Variability in soil moisture using AMSR-E product- A regional case study in the province of Marathwada division, India

“…The atmospheric attenuation and emission of signal are expressed as Eq. 3 for radiometers functioning in shorter wavelength ranges (Engman, 1991;E. G. Njoku et al, 2003;Sharma et al, 2018;Singh et al, 2015).…”

“…In above Eq. 4, e ¼ 1 À r ð Þ represents the emissivity depending upon medium dielectric constant (Engman, 1991;Singh et al, 2015).…”

“…It is considered a significant parameter in numerous applications such as agriculture, water management, climate studies, and environmental risk prediction (Suri, 2013). The variability of soil moisture at a given location is primarily determined by the amount of precipitation measured in the area (Karthikeyan & Kumar, 2014). Soil moisture is a crucial climatic parameter of higher importance in the rainfall scenario, and recognizing its spatialtemporal variability across the Indian region is of greater relevance (Sathyanadh et al, 2016).…”