Publication Details

Category Text Publication
Reference Category Journals
DOI 10.1016/j.rse.2024.114563
Title (Primary) Retrieval of 1 km surface soil moisture from Sentinel-1 over bare soil and grassland on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau
Author Xing, Z.; Zhao, L.; Fan, L.; De Lannoy, G.; Bai, X.; Liu, X.; Peng, J. ORCID logo ; Frappart, F.; Yang, K.; Li, X.; Zhou, Z.; Li, X.; Zeng, J.; Zou, D.; Du, E.; Wang, C.; Wang, L.; Li, Z.; Wigneron, J.-P.
Source Titel Remote Sensing of Environment
Year 2025
Department RS
Volume 318
Page From art. 114563
Language englisch
Topic T5 Future Landscapes
Data and Software links https://dx.doi.org/10.11888/Terre.tpdc.301128
Supplements https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S0034425724005893-mmc1.docx
Keywords Soil moisture; High-resolution; Sentinel-1; SAR; Active microwave; Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau
Abstract Most existing soil moisture (SM) products from earth observations and land surface models over the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau (QTP) have coarse resolutions or are mostly generated with high spatial resolutions based on downscaling methods. The former could hinder the applications in hydrological and ecological analyses at the regional scale and the performance of the latter could be limited by the intricate relationship between SM and downscaling factors in regions with complex topography. To address this issue, this paper aims to retrieve a 1 km SM product from 2017 to 2021 using Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) observations based on a semi-empirical method specific to the QTP region (SMS-1) as different from the previous downscaled SM products. The main interest in our retrievals is that the semi-empirical modeling approach allows exploring the relationships between microwave backscatters and the soil and vegetation parameters spatially based on well-defined mathematics. The SMS-1 retrievals were evaluated against the observations from five in-situ networks over the QTP and against six other existing downscaled 1 km SM products. The temporal evaluation against in-situ measurements showed that SMS-1 retrievals performed better than most 1 km SM products obtained from Machine Learning methods (median R = 0.57, ubRMSD = 0.064 m3/m3, RMSD = −0.107 m3/m3 and bias = −0.042 m3/m3) except for SMSg. Furthermore, the SMS-1 retrievals presented reasonable spatial patterns that are consistent with the spatial distribution of the grassland-type map. Our Sentinel-1 SAR-based method can therefore potentially serve as a foundation for the advance of active microwave remote sensing SM algorithm to retrieve spatially high-resolution SM.
Persistent UFZ Identifier https://www.ufz.de/index.php?en=20939&ufzPublicationIdentifier=30126
Xing, Z., Zhao, L., Fan, L., De Lannoy, G., Bai, X., Liu, X., Peng, J., Frappart, F., Yang, K., Li, X., Zhou, Z., Li, X., Zeng, J., Zou, D., Du, E., Wang, C., Wang, L., Li, Z., Wigneron, J.-P. (2025):
Retrieval of 1 km surface soil moisture from Sentinel-1 over bare soil and grassland on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau
Remote Sens. Environ. 318 , art. 114563 10.1016/j.rse.2024.114563