A Framework for High-Resolution Soil Moisture Extraction Using SCATSAT-1 Scatterometer Data

Abstract

Retrieving soil moisture with low-resolution data is quite a challenging task. For retrieving the soil moisture, knowledge of backscattered signal from bare soil and crop-covered soil is very much important, which is difficult to obtain from the low-resolution data. This problem may be solved by using optical data. Therefore, in this paper a novel approach is proposed to classify translucent and non-transparent vegetation areas using optical sensor data, which is further used in the estimation of soil moisture. The soil moisture product is then downscaled from 25 km to ∼5.6 km using vegetation temperature condition index which is computed using MODIS data. Obtained results show that this approach is able to retrieve soil moisture successfully and is able to downscale soil moisture data into higher resolution product.